Bluetooth Speakers Problems

Connecting to Device

To connect to the bluetooth speakers, I use the bluetoothctl commandline options. The following are commands I run for this to work:

sudo systemctl start bluetooth.service
bluetoothctl
# Within the bluetoothctl environment
power on
agent on
default-agent
scan on
pair A4:A7:B5:22:E6:F5
connect A4:A7:B5:22:E6:F5

If the device had been previously paired, I skip the pair step.

Sometimes, my bluetooth speakers would fail to connect. To fix this, I usually remove the item from the list of paired devices and try to pair again before connecting.

remove A4:A7:B5:22:E6:F5

Another problem I've experience is whereby the device connects but I can't hear sound from the speakers. To fix this, I first confirm that the device is set up as an a2dp device in pavucontrol. If this change has been made and there is still no sound, kill pulseaudio.

pulseaudio --kill

Audacity

Audacity could not link up with my bluetooth speakers during playback. However, the bluetooth speakers were visible from pavucontrol and I could hear audio from them when using other applications. To fix this, I had to install alsa-plugins.

sudo pacman -S alsa-plugins

Once this was done, the options pulse were available in audio recording and play back devices.