PulseAudio Plugin Allows For Better Bluetooth Audio Quality On Linux

[eydee]

Wake me up when PA has this by default in all major distros:



and also working mic echo cancellation out of the box. I often participate in meetings (Hangouts/Jitsi) and most of my co-workers are on Linux. The only way to have a decent conference call is when everyone but the speaker mutes their microphone 'cause otherwise echo from pretty much everyone kills the experience completely. We are now in 2019 and absolutely basic audio features are not available in Linux. Sigh.

Oh, the thing that makes everything echoy? Just put your head under water, same effect.

[miabrahams]

How does one find out which headsets support these improved codecs?

[ssokolow]

I have a question. Why not stream raw PCM to the headphones/speakers?

Bandwidth. There's not enough of it.

[tildearrow]

Typo:

still encumbered by patent/lega issues.

I have a question. Why not stream raw PCM to the headphones/speakers?

[xiando]

Fedora used to have a copr for this but it's been censored. It used to be https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/co...dules-bt-aptx/
Some discussion about this is on https://github.com/EHfive/pulseaudio...s-bt/issues/20

The audio codecs work fine once installed but there could be a small catch: The latency is a lot worse, notably so. Doesn't matter if you're listening to music, it's immediately obvious when viewing video. It's possible to solve this by adjusting the "Latency offset" in Pulseaudio. Your audio equipment and configuration will vary. In my case there's a latency difference between using SBC and AAC for some strange reason.

This plugin isn't new, btw, it's been around for years. I guess the news is that some guy discovered it and wrote a blog post about it.

[microcode]

tried Aptx on Linux some time ago and it worked great for me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTxjfi2DPOA

You are exactly like my friend, running Firefox on GNU/Linux on a MS Surface and refusing to use PulseAudio.

I really do wonder why Apple pushed on AAC with Bluetooth, Opus has been around for almost all of their product development cycle and it is at least as efficient and has considerably lower minimum latency. I guess for their product they have the AAC decoder hardware just sitting in some IP library, and they grafted it onto their ASIC.

LDAC is practically lossless, but it has ridiculously excessive bitrates.

[andre30correia]

Wake me up when PA has this by default in all major distros:



and also working mic echo cancellation out of the box. I often participate in meetings (Hangouts/Jitsi) and most of my co-workers are on Linux. The only way to have a decent conference call is when everyone but the speaker mutes their microphone 'cause otherwise echo from pretty much everyone kills the experience completely. We are now in 2019 and absolutely basic audio features are not available in Linux. Sigh.

echo cancelation works for me in skype or viber for example, hangouts don't have good options, maybe the problem is hangouts(I stop using it for the same reason) and not pulseaudio or linux distros, but in the end maybe the problem is the only guy who uses windows 10, I notice a lot of problem since october with windows 10 audio drivers

[dwagner]

and also working mic echo cancellation out of the box. I often participate in meetings (Hangouts/Jitsi) and most of my co-workers are on Linux. The only way to have a decent conference call is when everyone but the speaker mutes their microphone 'cause otherwise echo from pretty much everyone kills the experience completely. We are now in 2019 and absolutely basic audio features are not available in Linux. Sigh.

On every operating system echo cancellation "in software only" is always inferior to solutions where both the speaker and the microphone are controlled by the same chip whose manufacturer knows their characteristics up-front.
You won't regret investing into a https://www.jabra.com/business/speak...abra-speak-410 or alike for each workplace - provides awesome speech quality and practically perfect echo cancellation independent of the operating system or application used.

[rene]

tried Aptx on Linux some time ago and it worked great for me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTxjfi2DPOA

[microcode]

Wake me up when PA has this by default in all major distros:



and also working mic echo cancellation out of the box. I often participate in meetings (Hangouts/Jitsi) and most of my co-workers are on Linux. The only way to have a decent conference call is when everyone but the speaker mutes their microphone 'cause otherwise echo from pretty much everyone kills the experience completely. We are now in 2019 and absolutely basic audio features are not available in Linux. Sigh.

This is handled by PulseEffects; I know I was maybe not pleased that it's a separate program, but it does a pretty good job of managing the virtual devices it creates, and is generally pretty convenient for non-exotic audio setups. To play devil's advocate a bit, it's a bit of a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't kind of situation. Lennart Poettering gets a lot of criticism for making systemd too heavily integrated, but is criticized also for making PulseAudio not integrated enough!

Also, regarding "in all major distros", the PulseAudio project doesn't write the control panels and effects systems in desktop environments, and they do not control "major distros". If major distros are to have this, a maintainer from each distro must take the initiative to make that happen.

Not really sure what you mean by "basic audio features" on "Linux". As for echo cancellation, PulseEffects will do that for you too, along with dynamic range compression (which can help with audio too).