Re: Bluetooth A2DP

[Cameron Hutchison <lists@xdna.net>]

Mark Kamichoff <prox@prolixium.com> writes:

>It's got me wondering, do folks out there who have the appropriate
>headsets actually use Bluetooth hi-fi audio on Linux?  Perhaps there is
>a workaround for this problem that everybody's using, that doesn't
>appear on any Google searches?

I have been using my Philips SHB6100 headset with Debian sid (i686 and
x86_64) for the last 6 months or so, with some issues along the way, but
otherwise working pretty well.

I am using pulseaudio and bluetoothd to drive the headset, not alsa. I
have alsa configured to use pulseaudio for output, so all alsa is doing
is routing the default output to pulseaudio. I also have USB speakers,
which are driven by alsa when I chose that pulseaudio output.

I'm not completely sure what is needed to get this running as it is
something that I've played with quite a lot in the early days, but
looking at the packages I have manually installed, these seem to be the
related ones:
  gnome-bluetooth
  bluez-utils 
  gstreamer0.10-pulseaudio
  pulseaudio
  pulseaudio-esound-compat
  pulseaudio-module-bluetooth
  pulseaudio-module-gconf
  pulseaudio-module-hal
  pulseaudio-module-x11
  pulseaudio-module-zeroconf

bluetooth, bluez and bluez-alsa were automatically installed.

My /etc/asound.conf looks like this:
pcm.!default {
        type pulse
}
ctl.!default {
        type pulse
}

I'm quite happy with this setup. I can use pavucontrol to change
application audio streams between the USB speakers and the BT headset
without needing to restart any applications. It works with mplayer,
gnome applications (gstreamer) and iceweasel with nonfree flash. That
is, it works with all the apps I use.

Hope this helps.