[pulseaudio-discuss] Bluetooth ports

[Arun Raghavan]

David,

On Thu, 2012-11-22 at 16:55 +0100, David Henningsson wrote:
[...]
> ...now, I'm testing PulseAudio 2.99.2 and things do not show up as I 
> expect them to. In PulseAudio 2.x, there were no bluetooth ports at all, 
> in 2.99, "pactl list-cards" looks like this [1]. I don't know if it's a 
> bug, or if it is for a reason, but at least it's an unhappy surprise for me.
> 
> In short; if it's the same physical output on the device, it's *the same 
> port*. Just like my USB headset has one port in each direction, so 
> should my bluetooth headset. I e, there should not be one "hsp-output" 
> and one "a2dp-output" ports, because they go to the same headset, they 
> should share the same port, preferrably called "Headset" or something 
> similar.

A case could be made that they are not the same output -- A2DP is a
high-quality audio path, HSP is a speech-only path.

> To point out the practical problem for end users is that in GNOME sound 
> settings, it now looks like you're having two different headsets. :-(

I don't think this is such a bad thing. Having separate ports actually
makes the UI cleaner in some sense. With PA 2.1, I can go to the new
GNOME sound settings panel, choose my BT headset in the Input tab, and
select the A2DP profile. This makes no sense, since A2DP and input on
the headset are mutually exclusive. On my box, this crashes g-c-c.

With newer PA, the behaviour can be more in line with how we're doing
things for standard sound cards. If I select the A2DP port for output
and then the HSP port for input, then the output will automatically be
switched to something else, since the A2DP port becomes unavailable at
that point.

Thoughts?

Regards,
Arun