Painful BlueTooth Audio
I have a little Intel NUC running Debian Jessie whose purpose is to control a multimedia show using DMX for lighting and BLueTooth A2DP for audio. It's a wireless, headless box that sits in a corner and does its job. Well, it should be. The problem is the BlueTooth audio is far from automatic and also far from stable. I would like to be able to turn on the BlueTooth speakers, power up the NUC, start the application, and let it do its thing.
This is not the case.
In the best of times, I have to bring up BlueTooth Manager and manually connect to the loudspeaker. Then I have to bring up Settings => System Settings => Multimedia and select Technical Pro as the default sound device. Then I have to run Pulse Audio Volume Control and select Technical Pro as the output device. Is there any way (preferably a non graphical one) to put all this into one operation? I am ambivalent as to whether it should run automatically at start-up, but I definitely would like to have some way of running it without all the rigamarole on the desktop.
The above procedure is what has to happen, as I said, in the best of times. In the worst, things are much less smooth. One thing that happens regularly is BlueTooth Manager fails to come up properly. The little bouncing icon does its happy little dance of a bit, and then just disappears. An attempt to run BlueTooth Manager again results in an error, saying it is already running. I have to grep for "blue" in the running processes and then kill blueman-manager and blueman-applet. After that, I can usually start the app.
If the unit sits for a while without playing any audio, the link to the loudspeaker freezes, and I have to re-start the loudspeaker and reconnect to it, sometimes manually.
Here is the log for "blue" from Start-up:
Oct 13 16:51:58 DMXHost kernel: [ 2.638950] Bluetooth: Core ver 2.19
Oct 13 16:51:58 DMXHost kernel: [ 2.638976] Bluetooth: HCI device and connection manager initialized
Oct 13 16:51:58 DMXHost kernel: [ 2.638985] Bluetooth: HCI socket layer initialized
Oct 13 16:51:58 DMXHost kernel: [ 2.638989] Bluetooth: L2CAP socket layer initialized
Oct 13 16:51:58 DMXHost kernel: [ 2.639006] Bluetooth: SCO socket layer initialized
Oct 13 16:51:58 DMXHost bluetoothd[619]: Starting SDP server
Oct 13 16:51:58 DMXHost kernel: [ 7.171984] Bluetooth: BNEP (Ethernet Emulation) ver 1.3
Oct 13 16:51:58 DMXHost kernel: [ 7.171989] Bluetooth: BNEP filters: protocol multicast
Oct 13 16:51:58 DMXHost kernel: [ 7.172000] Bluetooth: BNEP socket layer initialized
Oct 13 16:51:58 DMXHost bluetoothd[619]: Bluetooth management interface 1.6 initialized
Oct 13 16:51:58 DMXHost bluetoothd[619]: Sap driver initialization failed.
Oct 13 16:51:58 DMXHost bluetoothd[619]: sap-server: Operation not permitted (1)
Oct 13 16:51:58 DMXHost bluetoothd[619]: hci0 Load Connection Parameters failed: Unknown Command (0x01)
Oct 13 16:52:11 DMXHost pulseaudio[1142]: org.bluez.Manager.GetProperties() failed: org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.UnknownMethod: Method "GetProperties" with signature "" on interface "org.bluez.Manager" doesn't exist
Oct 13 16:52:11 DMXHost bluetoothd[619]: Endpoint registered: sender=:1.22 path=/MediaEndpoint/A2DPSource
Oct 13 16:52:11 DMXHost bluetoothd[619]: Endpoint registered: sender=:1.22 path=/MediaEndpoint/A2DPSink
Oct 13 16:52:13 DMXHost dbus[634]: [system] Activating service name='org.blueman.Mechanism' (using servicehelper)
Oct 13 16:52:14 DMXHost blueman-mechanism: Starting blueman-mechanism
Oct 13 16:52:14 DMXHost dbus[634]: [system] Successfully activated service 'org.blueman.Mechanism'
Oct 13 16:52:14 DMXHost blueman-mechanism: loading Config
Oct 13 16:52:14 DMXHost blueman-mechanism: loading Ppp
Oct 13 16:52:14 DMXHost blueman-mechanism: loading RfKill
Oct 13 16:52:14 DMXHost blueman-mechanism: loading Network
Oct 13 16:52:14 DMXHost kernel: [ 23.394518] Bluetooth: RFCOMM TTY layer initialized
Oct 13 16:52:14 DMXHost kernel: [ 23.394535] Bluetooth: RFCOMM socket layer initialized
Oct 13 16:52:14 DMXHost kernel: [ 23.394549] Bluetooth: RFCOMM ver 1.11
and from pulseaudio:
Oct 13 16:52:11 DMXHost pulseaudio[1142]: Failed to open cookie file '/root/.config/pulse/cookie': No such file or directory
Oct 13 16:52:11 DMXHost pulseaudio[1142]: Failed to load authorization key '/root/.config/pulse/cookie': No such file or directory
Oct 13 16:52:11 DMXHost pulseaudio[1142]: org.bluez.Manager.GetProperties() failed: org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.UnknownMethod: Method "GetProperties" with signature "" on interface "org.bluez.Manager" doesn't exist
When an attempt to run bluetooth-manager fails, I get this:
Oct 13 16:52:44 DMXHost blueman-mechanism: Exiting
Oct 13 16:52:44 DMXHost org.blueman.Mechanism[634]: Exception AttributeError: "'NoneType' object has no attribute 'stdout'" in <bound method Tee.__del__ of <__main__.Tee object at 0xb6d08a2c>> ignored
Oct 13 16:52:44 DMXHost org.blueman.Mechanism[634]: Starting blueman-mechanism
Oct 13 16:52:44 DMXHost org.blueman.Mechanism[634]: loading Config
Oct 13 16:52:44 DMXHost org.blueman.Mechanism[634]: loading Ppp
Oct 13 16:52:44 DMXHost org.blueman.Mechanism[634]: loading RfKill
Oct 13 16:52:44 DMXHost org.blueman.Mechanism[634]: loading Network
Oct 13 16:52:44 DMXHost org.blueman.Mechanism[634]: Exiting
Oct 13 16:57:06 DMXHost pulseaudio[1142]: Module "module-device-manager" should be loaded once at most. Refusing to load.
A successful load of BlueTooth Manager produces this:
Oct 13 17:06:11 DMXHost dbus[634]: [system] Activating service name='org.blueman.Mechanism' (using servicehelper)
Oct 13 17:06:11 DMXHost blueman-mechanism: Starting blueman-mechanism
Oct 13 17:06:11 DMXHost dbus[634]: [system] Successfully activated service 'org.blueman.Mechanism'
Oct 13 17:06:11 DMXHost blueman-mechanism: loading Config
Oct 13 17:06:11 DMXHost blueman-mechanism: loading Ppp
Oct 13 17:06:11 DMXHost blueman-mechanism: loading RfKill
Oct 13 17:06:11 DMXHost blueman-mechanism: loading Network
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