Help setting up bluetooth headphones with ALSA

[phodgson11]

Hello,

I've followed the guide on the wiki for bluetooth headsets, and gotten everything to work, but it's not gotten me what I expected: you have to pass the 'bluealsa' device to the application before you run it, so already running applications can't switch, and some applications don't even have that as an option. Making it the default device fixes the latter, but not the former.

I want to be able to switch from my laptop speakers to the bluetooth headset on the fly, so I would like the bluetooth headset to be added as another output for the default alsa device, similar to the speakers and headphone jack, which can be independently muted, so I could just toggle between muting the speakers and muting the headset with amixer. Is it possible to do this?

I don't have much experience with audio programming and ALSA, especially asound.conf, is very cryptic to me. Any help or links to tutorials would be much appreciated. Or let me know if this is a problem which can only be solved with another layer of software like Pulseaudio.

[lars_the_bear]

Hi

I think that ALSA simply does not have the capability you require. Using BT headphones with ALSA is a painful experience, because ALSA is not designed to allow applications to switch audio devices at runtime. Applications could be coded to make that possible but, on the whole, my experience is that they have not been. Usually an application just opens an ALSA device, and keeps it open until it exits.

I think this is the main limitation of ALSA that Pulse/Pipewire was developed to improve. An application can keep open a Pulse channel, and let Pulse switch ALSA devices. But that does mean giving Pulse/PipeWire complete control of the ALSA system, which is not something I can put up with.

FWIW `blueaudio` is not an ALSA PCM, but a protocol. Applications that enumerate PCMs in ALSA won't usually see blueaudio as a choice. However, my experience is that all applications (that I've tried) will use bluealsa if they are forced to. For example:

vlc -A alsa --alsa-audio-device:bluealsa

That works, even though VLC does not list 'bluealsa' as an ALSA output device.

I do use ALSA with BT headphones, but I don't find it an agreeable experience. I don't usually wish to have Pulse back, but that's a time when I do :/

BR, Lars.

[phodgson11]

Thank you for the informative reply. I'll think about my options.

If you don't mind me asking, I'm curious how do Pulse/Pipewire take complete control of ALSA so that it is unusable to you?

[lars_the_bear]