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bablokb / pi-btaudio

Bluetooth Audio for headless Raspbian systems
GNU General Public License v3.0
87 stars 13 forks source link

My experience w/ BT audio on RPi OS 'bookworm' #13

Closed seamusdemora closed 3 months ago

seamusdemora commented 3 months ago

Hello - I've followed your repo for some time, and generally agree with your recommendations. However, I'd like to suggest something different for some of the RPi hardware. My experience is limited to the RPi Zero 2W and RPi 3A+; in both cases I run these systems from the "Lite" 'bookworm' distro (i.e. armhf).

What I've found is that installing the pipewire packages from Debian's bookworm-backports has been the "key to happiness".

Recently, bookworm-backports yields a pipewire version of 1.2.1, and a wireplumber version of 0.4.17.

I also believe the RPi BT hardware has issues (e.g. BT & WiFi share a single antenna). In testing to date on a Zero 2W, only the backported pipewire packages have been able to overcome these issues and deliver reliable, high-quality sound. Testing on the 3A+ with the default pipewire packages has required an external USB BT "dongle" to achieve the same level of reliability & sound quality.

I initially tried 'bluez-alsa' - as you have suggested. It was a significant improvement over all other solutions (for a while), but for me & my systems, it falls a bit short of pipewire for connection reliability. It may also interest you to know that Debian now has a bluez-alsa package. I've not been motivated to try this b/c the backported pipewire is operating so well.

And finally, I share your views wrt the "complications" of getting BT audio working in Linux... it is far more complicated than it should be!

bablokb commented 3 months ago

Thanks for the contribution! I must admit that I haven't recently updated any systems, so I have no personal experience with pipewire. But everything I read about it sounds promising. I only hope that pipewire will be more stable across different OS-releases. That was one of the core problems with bluez-alsa: it sometimes worked great only to fail after an update of the base system.

bablokb commented 3 months ago

Updated the readme to point to this issue.

seamusdemora commented 3 months ago

Thanks for the contribution! I must admit that I haven't recently updated any systems, so I have no personal experience with pipewire. But everything I read about it sounds promising. I only hope that pipewire will be more stable across different OS-releases. That was one of the core problems with bluez-alsa: it sometimes worked great only to fail after an update of the base system.

I cannot answer the question re pipewire stability across different releases as I have no experience I could call relevant. I suppose all we can do is keep our "fingers crossed" :)

I do think the bluez-alsa guys are very competent - and super helpful (I've asked a lot of questions :) I'd love to use it - it's significantly "lighter weight" than pipewire, but it's just not as reliable - on my systems. And so far, I've been unable to get them interested into looking into the issue deeper (it may well be that the RPi hardware/firmware is the culprit!).

And please feel free to close this "issue" whenever you like.

seamusdemora commented 1 month ago

Just another quick update: pipewire continues to work superbly on my systems, BUT :

If you're following backports in /etc/sources.list, know that a recent upgrade destroyed my BT setup. As it turns out, this was caused by the wireplumber from backports. The easiest thing to do for now may be to remove the backports listing from /etc/sources.list. I'm sure this will be fixed, but when is an unknown.