Ubuntu – bluetooth does not appear in pulseaudio as a possible source/sink

14.04androidbluetoothpulseaudiosound

I am trying to setup my ubuntustudio 14.04 , 64bit as a bluetooth audio sink (service a2snk in a2DP), so that I can redirect music from the android phone to the pc and from there to my speakers.

I am following this guide which even though older can still work without too many modifications, up to the point where I have to load 

sudo apt-get install pulseaudio-module-bluetooth
pactl load-module module-bluethooth-discover

Now, installing the module works as expected. But loading the module fails, so even though phone -> pc audio connection has been established, no bluetooth device pops up in pulse-audio and as such I hear no sound from the speakers.

This module appears in pulseaudio :

pactl list short modules | grep blue
9       module-bluetooth-policy 
22      module-bluetooth-discover

Checking syslog, it states the following related info 

Dec 14 12:32:19 starmaze NetworkManager[1243]: <info> (50:32:75:B3:DA:31): new Bluetooth device (driver: 'bluez' ifindex: 0)

where 50:32:75:B3:DA:31 is indeed the bluetooth MAC address of my android phone.

and a little later

Dec 14 12:38:47 starmaze pulseaudio[2663]: [pulseaudio] module-bluetooth-device.c: /org/bluez/942/hci0/dev_50_32_75_B3_DA_31 is not a valid BlueZ audio device.
Dec 14 12:38:47 starmaze pulseaudio[2663]: [pulseaudio] module.c: Failed to load module "module-bluetooth-device" (argument: "path=/org/bluez/942/hci0/dev_50_32_75_B3_DA_31 address=50:32:75:B3:DA:31 profile=a2dp_source source_properties=device.icon_name=blueman card_properties=device.icon_name=blueman"): initialization failed.

From these other threads:
AU1 , AU2 , AU3 , AU4 , AU5

running pulseaudio -k does not seem to solve the issues and a contradictory statement to Disable=Socket in `/etc/bluetooth/audio.conf actually makes the service "a2dsnk" as broadcast from the pc to the phone to disappear.

What could be wrong?
I guess the problem is pinpointed in a failure to load the bluetooth-discover module in pulseaudio or something related. But with all the info (sometimes contradictory) out there, I can not be certain. Can you help?

EDIT:

lsusb returns

Bus 006 Device 004: ID 0a12:0001 Cambridge Silicon Radio, Ltd Bluetooth Dongle (HCI mode)

lsusb -t returns

/:  Bus 06.Port 1: Dev 1, Class=root_hub, Driver=uhci_hcd/2p, 12M
    |__ Port 1: Dev 4, If 0, Class=Wireless, Driver=btusb, 12M
    |__ Port 1: Dev 4, If 1, Class=Wireless, Driver=btusb, 12M
    |__ Port 1: Dev 4, If 2, Class=Application Specific Interface, Driver=, 12M

lspci and lspci -nnk are over in pastebin. Not sure how this will help so I included all the output.

Best Answer

On my system this problem was caused by gdm starting a pulseaudio client and grabbing the bluetooth audio card before the user's client could. I fixed it by disabling pulseaudio for the gdm user: in

/var/lib/gdm/.config/pulse/client.conf

added:

autospawn = no
daemon-binary = /bin/true
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