I am running UbuntuStudio with KDE Plasma, using last week's release of 22.10. The new version now supports headsets, and I had been using an Anker Soundcore as stereo speakers, I've used it with ubuntu for years, but it is now recognized as a Headset. In the Audio Settings I could test the mono output, but I needed the stereo mode, so set out to see if that could be switched back, which required bluetoothctl and I also installed blueman, and I may have installed pulseaudio, but I think it was there already.
Whatever I did, I now see the bt device connected, but no sound device appears for it, and all of the built-in sound devices no longer show in the Audio System Settings. The built-ins show in lspci and in aplay -l
I tried following a guide here to "replace pulse with pipewire in 20.04" and it seemed to work, but the check-step failed:
$ pactl info
Connection failure: Connection refused
Troubleshooting guides here and here are all pulseaudio orientated, so I don't know if I should run pulseaudio -D, and I can't remove pulseaudio with apt without removing the desktop. That transition guide also recommended a systemctl mask on pulseaudio and to unmask pipewire. This may have been bad advice.
$fuser -v /dev/snd/*
produces nothing at all. I've reinstalled all packages with pipewire in the name, deleted my home .config/pulse and the /etc/pulseaudio (which was empty), rebooting between changes.
I noticed my syslog is filling up with this pair, once per second:
kdeconnectd[3040]: org.kde.pulseaudio: context kaput
plasmashell[2951]: org.kde.plasma.pulseaudio: context kaput
Google could not find any relevant links for "pulseaudio context kaput" and the pavucontrol that worked before now does not connect.This suggested the pulseaudio daemon is needed and be unmasked, and doing this, I now see my built-in devices, but not the bt. The Anker shows in the list as an Audio device, but connecting it responds:
# connect 08:EB:ED:26:06:22
Attempting to connect to 08:EB:ED:26:06:22
Failed to connect: org.bluez.Error.Failed br-connection-profile-unavailable
I haven't found any useful references on these br-connection messages.
so mostly now I am confused and not sure what my next step should be. Is this a pulseaudio problem? or a pipewire problem? or a bluetooth problem? Or something else.
