Blud forgot to install Pipewire
Pulseaudio. For a long time my Sony headphones had no working mic. Then one magical update, I had full HSP as well as A2DP sink. It was amazing - I could take teams calls without having to change headsets!
Then one not-so magical update, poof it just went. I tried to scour the bug list in pulseaudio to find anyone who had experienced the same but found the bugtracker impossible to navigate without a login account.
So now I wait, and update, and pray for an update that restores this feature.
The answer is PipeWire. It’s a drop-in replacement for PulseAudio that works.
Just use a decently recent distro or update to pipewire (and recent kernel). Pulseaudio is basically not where the good things are done anymore. It’s been more than a year or 2 already that the sony phones have microphone working properly.
It is a hard moving bunch of pieces that needed to be in place. The user libraries (pulseaudio or pipewire) the bluez stack and the kernel. For a while things were almost working on the first parts but there were problems on the kernel side then the kernel received patches and it finally was able to support the good audio codec.
(I hate saying this, but) I’m on arch, and using pretty up-to-date versions of pulse and wireplumber, but no dice. I’ve tried the LTS kernel, still no dice. I think it’s a regression that has somehow largely gone unnoticed, because I cannot find any bug reports about it, despite the headphones being quite popular
That could be a combination of something only you have or really just a bug unreported. I would recommend trying to open a bug report and maybe more people can chime in and help.
I’ve personally had a bunch of regressions and problems with some versions, but it’s been fixed for my specific devices. Got 2 codecs for input/mic I can choose and the others for sound output including ldac working nicely.
I manually disabled HSP in pulseaudio. I’d rather use an external mic than subject myself to the atrocious audio quality of HSP.
Wrong OS, that’s Windows.
Since Pipewire came around that means. Before… well… let’s not talk about the collective Pulseaudio trauma.
Well, I have this weird issue when playing Fallout 76 through Steam on Ubuntu 24.04.
If I use my Bluetooth headphones to play, journalctl shows periodic streams of pipewire errors (not near my laptop or I would paste the errors), and after one or two hours audio will become silent. I can recover stopping the game, reconnecting the headphones, and starting the game.
It seems like a problem with the game, as other games, including the other Fallouts, work flawlessly. Still shouldn’t overwhelm pipewire IMO.
TBH the last audio quirk I had on Linux was two years ago, it wouldn’t remember the volume of my headphones, and it was solved on its own after an update.
Oh god, I had such weird issues with audio on my manjaro desktop with pulseaudio … Never touched anything related to sound on that system again, out of fear everything would break down again. I didn’t switch to pipewire until years later.
Anecdotally, I’ve had way more audio issues in Windows than I’ve had in Linux.
Linux audio setups don’t always work out-of-the-box, and sometimes require a bit more configuration, but once you get them set up the way you like, they stay that way.
Windows audio configuration is flaky as hell. It’s constantly changing with updates, and I’ve had so many issues with drivers just silently failing. It seems to have the most trouble with discrete sound cards and USB audio interfaces. I can’t tell you how many Discord and Teams calls I’ve had in Windows where the first 5 minutes is re-configuring audio settings that didn’t stick. This is basically a non-issue in my Linux setups.
macOS audio is probably the best combination of easy to configure and it works consistently. The biggest downside is that you need a lot of 3rd party software to do anything more advanced than setting a single device and volume for the entire system.
Note: I primarily use pipewire now. I used to have more problems back when I used pulseaudio.
I lose sound so much more in Windows. I love it when it thinks an HDMI monitor is the main sound even though I never selected it and have to change it back a few times a year. (work computer)
