I have a pair of bluetooth headphones which have a 'standby' mode, in which they drop into a low-power state when the computer they are connected it isn't sending them an audio stream.
I can tell if they are in this low-power state because they make a very quiet buzzing sound when there's no sound playing, and this noise stops when they go into standby.
Unfortunately, with Ubuntu, they aren't dropping into this low-power state at all, at least until I manually restart pulseaudio with pulseaudio --kill; pulseaudio --start and then manually reconnect to the headphones through the bluetooth menu.
Sometimes I'll have to run the above several times in a day.
My question is this: How can I configure Ubuntu to cut the audio stream going to my bluetooth headphones when it's silent (even if an application is technically playing 'audio')?
I think I'm after a noise gate, but for the output stream rather than the input stream.
Edit: This is still an issue on both 20.04 and 20.10.
- Requested output from
journalctl -p warning | grep pulseaudio: https://pastebin.com/9dsGhbBk - I've tried muting completely as per https://askubuntu.com/a/404242/349837 - but it didn't help.
- The headphones in question are connected via Bluetooth, and are Philips SHB 7000 if it makes any difference.
journalctl -p warning | grep pulseaudio. Did you try muting completeley? – Pablo Bianchi Jun 24 '21 at 16:18