[pulseaudio-discuss] [BUG] Using bluez 5.5 & pulseaudio a bluetooth headset cannot be used as a recording device.

[Alexander Winnig]

Thanks.

Am 31.05.2013 15:11, schrieb Tanu Kaskinen:
> Please use the "reply-to-all" functionality of your mail client. I added
> pulseaudio-discuss back to CC once again.
>
> On Fri, 2013-05-31 at 12:55 +0200, Alexander Winnig wrote:
>> Thanks for your efforts.
>>> Some notes about the video:
>>>
>>> At 1:21 the available sinks and sources only include the auto_null sink
>>> and its monitor source. Why isn't the RPi's own sound card getting
>>> detected? Well, let's not worry too much about that
>> It used to. But I thought that raspberry's pulseaudio and bluez -
>> versions were too low and some people said that newer versions worked
>> with bt-headsets I configured, made and made-installed pa and bluez,
>> which was a pain.
>>
>>> At 4:23 we see that there still isn't other sinks than auto_null. Either
>>> the bluetooth card profile is "off", or PulseAudio had problems with
>>> creating a sink for the headset.
>> See above.
>>> Conclusion: remove the .asoundrc file.
>> Done.
>>
>>>    It's totally unnecessary, and the
>>> bluetooth alsa plugin might interfere with PulseAudio's ability to
>>> access the headset. This is not the biggest problem, though - the real
>>> blocker is that on the command line pactl and friends access a different
>>> server than pavucontrol. I don't know the reason for that. The
>>> "pulseaudio -k" command in the beginning doesn't find any running
>>> daemons, although I suspect that there is a daemon running.
>>>
>>> Have you compiled pulseaudio from source?
>> Yes.
>>> Have you edited .bashrc to set
>>> up e.g. LD_LIBRARY_PATH, resulting in a different environment in the
>>> shell compared to the LXDE desktop environment, from which pavucontrol
>>> is launched?
>> So what you are saying is that the shell just doesn't find
>> bluez/pulseaudio so it cannot record?
> I'm saying that applications that are started within the shell don't see
> the pulseaudio daemon that has been started outside the shell. When you
> start pulseaudio in the shell (via autospawning in the video), the end
> result is that you have two daemons running, and the second one doesn't
> have access to the hardware because it's in use by the first daemon.
>
> The likely reason for not finding the running daemon is that the running
> daemon is the distro-provided pulseaudio version and uses the
> distro-provided libpulse under /usr/lib, which often contains different
> runtime file search paths than libpulse under /usr/local/lib that you
> have compiled yourself.
>
> I don't know why the distro-provided pulseaudio version would be
> running. Have you rebooted since installing the self-compiled
> pulseaudio?
Yes, multiple times.
>> Doesn't that mean that using the
>> LXDE it should be able to record? Because using audacity it doesn't
>> record there aswell.
> Yes, starting recording applications like you started pavucontrol should
> work. Audacity isn't perhaps the best application to try, because it
> doesn't support PulseAudio natively and I've had to mess with the alsa
> configuration in the past in order to make Audacity work with
> PulseAudio. I'm not sure what better alternative I should recommend,
> though.
Ultimately I dislike audacity because it takes ages to load and I want 
to use the cli-pulseaudio(I am using a c-programme to interface with the 
pa-simple-api, for which I need a pa-source) anyways. I switched to the 
LXDE because I wanted to see if it was working at all.
>
>> PS: Am I close to the finish line or are there major obstacles that
>> could make this a vain endeavour? Does the recognition of the headset
>> and the hsp profile mean, that recording is possible in any case(given
>> the device does not have a hardware defect and is working as a normal
>> headset with a phone flawlessly)?
> Things seem to be working fine in the sense that the headset appears as
> an input device in pavucontrol. You just need to make both the desktop
> session and the shell agree about what version of pulseaudio to use. A
> reboot should do the trick. If it doesn't, check
> if /usr/bin/start-pulseaudio-x11 and /usr/local/bin/start-pulseaudio-x11
> exist. If only the first one exists, then that's probably the
> problem: /usr/bin/start-pulseaudio-x11 refers to the pulseaudio binary
> by its absolute path, which in case of /usr/bin/start-pulseaudio-x11
> is /usr/bin/pulseaudio.
>
/usr/local/bin/start-pulseaudio-x11 actually didn't exist. Should I 
create it or copy /usr/bin/start-pulseaudio-x11 to 
/usr/local/bin/start-pulseaudio-x11? I copied it over, rebooted but 
pactl list sources short still does not list sources.

BTW: pactl used to list the bluez source but that didn't solve the 
problem because it didn't record back then.

BTW: I did not use any flags when building bluez and pulseaudio...