[pulseaudio-discuss] Bluetooth ports

[David Henningsson]

On 11/23/2012 05:24 AM, Arun Raghavan wrote:
> 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.

It is still inconsistent with how we deal with ALSA cards. On my USB 
headset, I can use both "Analog stereo" and "Analog mono", analog stereo 
is the high-quality audio path. But both share the same port. (And I'd 
like to keep it that way, especially now that we've built a GUI that 
builds on this premise.)

>> 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.

The way I want it to work would be that on the output tab, you can 
choose between "A2DP", "HSP" and "Off" for the profile combobox, and 
between "HSP" and "Off" on the input tab. Switching from HSP to A2DP on 
the output tab automatically switches from HSP to Off on the input tab.

Crashing g-c-c is not the way I want it to work ;-)

Btw, just for those of you who don't know what it looks like today, with 
2.99.2: http://i.imgur.com/RgyRx.png


-- 
David Henningsson, Canonical Ltd.
https://launchpad.net/~diwic