Ubuntu – Bluetooth speaker: preferred mode “High fidelity playback” (A2DP) is not getting saved

13.04bluetoothsoundspeakersunity

UPDATE Aug 2017: The solution marked as accepted by me apppears to have worked until Ubuntu 15.10. For 16.04+ choose one of the more recent solutions.

For 16.04+ the config file is /etc/bluetooth/main.conf NOT /etc/bluetooth/audio.conf .

I have a bluetooth speaker, Sony SRS-BTX300, which works in linux/ubuntu 13.04, but only after some fiddling. (Update Dec 2013: same problems remain in 13.10)

I have to set the preferred bandwidth mode to "High fidelity playback" (A2DP) each time after switching on the computer and reconnecting the speaker.

The mode resets itself to "telephony/duplex" (=low bandwidth) every time. It takes about 20 clicks to reset the speaker, (click through menu, disconnect, reconnects, select mode, test), and these are definitely too many clicks.

How can I make "A2DP" mode the default mode, an do so in a persistent manner?

A few screen shots will illustrate.

After choosing this menu by clicking on the bluetooth icon in the top panel in Unity…

Bluetooth Icon on panel

After setting up this…

A2DP

… the preferred mode will be reset to this after restarting/suspending the computer

Telephony Duplex

Best Answer

There's an option in /etc/bluetooth/audio.conf called aAutoConnect=truewhich is hashed out.

sudo nano /etc/bluetooth/audio.conf

Delete the "#" at the start of the AutoConnect=true line

I found enabling this option by removing the # and got things connecting properly with my bluetooth headset

Restart the bluetooth service for the change to take effect:

sudo service bluetooth restart