[pulseaudio-discuss] Jack, pulse, skype and google talk

[Tanu Kaskinen]

On Mon, 2013-03-18 at 18:37 -0700, Len Ovens wrote:
> On Mon, March 18, 2013 6:07 pm, Bearcat Şándor wrote:
> 
> > I have jack loaded most of the time and it works great with pulseaudio now
> > (for the most part). It's very convenient not to have to switch back and
> > forth.
> 
> Yes it is doing really well.
> 
> > However skype and googletalk don't behave. Skype seems to grab on to
> 
> At least they don't behave as expected.
> 
> > pulseaudio and neither one of them see my bluetooth headset. Would guess
> > that with qjackctrl running things would need to be put though jack first.
> > That's what the jack plugin in the asound setup is for yes?
> 
> From my understanding of pulse/alsa/jack, that makes sense. When pulse
> starts, it tries to obtain all audio devices. That would include the BT
> headset. I don't know how many audio devices you have installed, but
> probably three, two at least. I suspect that with jack running, pulse is
> either set to use jacksink as the default output, or the device jack owns.
> 
> pulse probably owns the BT HP, so to make skype use that, set the pulse
> default to the BT HP before starting skype, or change the inputs and
> outputs after skype connects. This can be done from pavucontrol. If you
> want skype to be able to directly use the BT HP, turn that device OFF in
> pulse and set skype to use ALSA.

A small correction: Bluetooth support on Linux is implemented by BlueZ,
not ALSA. I'm pretty sure Skype hasn't implemented BlueZ support itself,
so the only way Skype is able to use the Bluetooth headset is through
PulseAudio (there might be an ALSA plugin for accessing the Bluetooth
device through ALSA, but I don't recommend messing with that).

It should be sufficient to move the Skype/Google Talk streams to the
Bluetooth device with pavucontrol. And make sure that the Bluetooth card
profile is Telephony (HSP/HFP) in pavucontrol's Configuration tab.

-- 
Tanu