Ubuntu – Bluetooth Headphones switches from (A2DP sink) to (HSP/HFP) when starting VoIP application

a2dpbluetoothvoip

since a few weeks I have some (more) trouble with my bluetooth headphones Sony WH-H900-N in Ubuntu 18.04 (but also in Linux Mint). It is a headphone with noice cancellation feature. So it does have a microphone for this purpose, but I doubt that it is good enough to use as input for VoIP applications. Instead I would like to use a webcam as microphone input.

So here are my problems:

-I am able to connect the headphones more or less properly, but I have to manually pair it in every session and manually set it to A2DP profile. Using this annoying workaround it works as an high quality audio sink.

-Whenever I connect to any VoIP application (Telegram call, connect to TeamSpeak Server, Skype) for some reason it automatically switches from A2DP audio sink profile to Headset Head Unit (HSP/HFP) Profile. The result is, that I can not hear anything anymore. Neither system sounds, nor the audio from the voice call. People hear me talking though and it seems like the correct microphone is used as input (the webcam, NOT the microphone from the headphones).

Strangely I had no problems with calls until some weeks ago. And this is true for two different systems (Ubuntu, Linux Mint). So I guess there was some recent common update that causes the problems.

Does anybody know how I can fix this issue? To me it seems like permanently setting the headphones as A2DP audio sink and permanently setting the webcam as default microphone input could solve this. But I am not sure how this noice cancellation thing interacts with all this. Plus I don't know how to set things up permanently and I read terrible stories of people trying to manually mess with pulseaudio 🙂

Any help is appreciated!

Best Answer

Been having this problem for months. Finally got around to googling for a solution and I found this answer on the arch linux forums (from user v1del):

From pulseaudio 10.0 release notes:

Pulse release notes wrote: Bluetooth headsets typically support both the A2DP profile, which is suitable for music, and the HSP profile, which is suitable for telephony use cases. module-bluetooth-policy will now automatically switch the profile of a Bluetooth headset from A2DP to HSP/HFP when an application creates a recording stream with property media.role=phone (telephony applications should set that property for their streams). When the stream goes away, the profile gets restored back to A2DP. This way the user doesn't have to manually switch the profiles when starting and stopping a call. This behaviour can be disabled by giving argument auto_switch=false to module-bluetooth-policy.

Basically you need to change this line in the file /etc/pulse/default.pa:

### Automatically load driver modules for Bluetooth hardware
ifexists module-bluetooth-policy.so
load-module module-bluetooth-policy
.endif

To:

### Automatically load driver modules for Bluetooth hardware
ifexists module-bluetooth-policy.so
load-module module-bluetooth-policy auto_switch=false
.endif

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – Bluetooth profile locked to A2DP (high-quality audio sink) but cannot change to HFP/HSP (low-quality bidirectional headset)

EDIT: also try connecting using Blueman. I don't know why PulseAudio has so much trouble but simply opening Blueman, right-clicking on my headphones in the overview, and selecting Audio Profile > Headset Head Unit (HSP/HFP) fixed it for me. I have since stopped and removed oFono and it still seems to work.

I had a similar (the same?) problem with my Bose QC35 II and fixed it by following these instructions ("Using HFP with oFono").

I'm on Debian buster so things might be a little bit different for you.

Install ofono and ofono-phonesim:
```
sudo apt-get install ofono-phonesim
```

Clone the oFono Git repository (currently at cf850de632):

git clone git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/network/ofono/ofono.git
cd ofono

List the available modems you have:
```
./test/list-modems
```
It'll probably have no modems, which is not surprising on a modern Linux desktop. But for reasons I don't really understand you really do need to have some sort of modem to get headphones to work, so we're going to simulate one now.
Start by simulating one (you can probably pick a different port if you want):
```
ofono-phonesim -p 12345 /usr/share/phonesim/default.xml
```
Modify /etc/ofono/phonesim.conf to use this simulated modem. My Debian version was so kind to put something in there already but commented it out. This is what it looks like for me now (without the comments):
```
[phonesim]
Driver=phonesim
Address=127.0.0.1
Port=12345
```
Restart oFono:
```
sudo service ofono restart
```
Check that the device is now listed:
```
./test/list-modems
```

Enable the device:

./test/enable-modem /phonesim

If you get an error like this, make sure your phonesim is up and running:

Connecting modem /phonesim...
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "./test/enable-modem", line 20, in <module>
    modem.SetProperty("Powered", dbus.Boolean(1), timeout = 120)
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/dbus/proxies.py", line 70, in __call__
    return self._proxy_method(*args, **keywords)
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/dbus/proxies.py", line 145, in __call__
    **keywords)
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/dbus/connection.py", line 651, in call_blocking
    message, timeout)
dbus.exceptions.DBusException: org.ofono.Error.Failed: Operation failed

Check that the device is now powered on using ./test/list-modems.

Hopefully it works now! You may need to restart other services too (bluez, pulseaudio).

I can now pick my headphone as an input device. It will cause the device to use very low quality audio but at least it works. Make sure to switch back to "High Fidelity Playback (A2DP Sink)" when you're done with the microphone as you'll otherwise get very low quality audio output.

Ubuntu – Hsp/hfp doesn’t work on Ubuntu 18.04.1 LTS with bluetooth headphones

If it is a Broadcom chip this might help you:

lsusb

# Bus 001 Device 003: ID 0a5c:21e6 Broadcom Corp. BCM20702 Bluetooth 4.0 [ThinkPad]

I could connect the headset before, but just like for you, as soon as I switched to HSP/HFP the mic and audio wouldn't work.

I tried some things. But I'm pretty sure this was the solving step: Found this link in another article somewhere.

I replaced my BCM firmware file with the one downloaded from plugable (link below). Make sure that you have a that chip first! And I'd recommend to do some backup of the original firmware files as well.

cd /lib/firmware/brcm
# backup original
cp BCM20702A<yourversion>.hcd xxxBCM20702A<yourversion>.hcd

https://plugable.com/2014/06/23/plugable-usb-bluetooth-adapter-solving-hfphsp-profile-issues-on-linux/

Then I pretty much followed these instructions, point out that I had to use the name of my original driver. I first missed this and had something saying 'could not find' in

dmesg | grep -i blue

As soon as you replaced the files shut down your machine (not just reboot) and start it up again. Works for me now =) I'd love to here if this did the job.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – Bluetooth profile locked to A2DP (high-quality audio sink) but cannot change to HFP/HSP (low-quality bidirectional headset)

Ubuntu – Hsp/hfp doesn’t work on Ubuntu 18.04.1 LTS with bluetooth headphones

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