6 ms·

I love that Apple hasn’t been able to fix their Bluetooth bugs in forever. I always hope they’ll be fixed with the next OS version, maybe the next MacBook, mayb

by rudian 5y ago

I love that Apple hasn’t been able to fix their Bluetooth bugs in forever. I always hope they’ll be fixed with the next OS version, maybe the next MacBook, maybe the next iPhone. Nope. My AirPods have regular issues and my Magic Mouse regularly disconnects. I hoped my next M1 would solve it. Guess not.

fastball 5y ago
Apple is still using Broadcom chips for BT, which might be part of the problem. Doesn't really make sense for a new CPU/GPU to fix the problem, what you want is for Apple to stick in their own networking cards.
abrookewood 5y ago
I don't know that it's a Mac thing - I get similar Bluetooth issues on Windows. Honestly, Bluetooth just isn't that good.
- jcelerier 5y ago
  The best software stack for bluetooth audio is the one provided by Pipewire on Linux.
  - m0zg 5y ago
    Pipewire for some reason insists on using GTK4 for its UI though, which hangs X cold if you use any of the popovers in it. I didn't even know it was possible to hang X like that.
    - onkoe 5y ago
      Is that an X issue or a GTK issue? Haven't heard of this before and it sounds scary
    - nyanpasu64 5y ago
      What do you mean by a Pipewire UI? It's a background daemon (or three: pipewire, a session manager, and pipewire-pulse). EDIT: Perhaps the parent means Helvum, which ldd says links to libgtk-4.so.1 => /usr/lib/libgtk-4.so.1. However, I can't figure out how to open a popover (https://python-gtk-3-tutorial.readthedocs.io/en/latest/popover.html https://python-gtk-3-tutorial.readthedocs.io/en/latest/popov...) in the app; all I can do is drag to create or break connections.
      - m0zg 5y ago
        Try to set up https://github.com/jaakkopasanen/AutoEq https://github.com/jaakkopasanen/AutoEq impulse responses for headphones, and you _will_ inevitably hang your X. Daemon isn't terribly useful on its own if you can't set it up to do what you need. So anyone considering Pipewire as a "better" alternative to anything should also know, at a minimum, that it's difficult/impossible to uninstall and buggy AF.
        nyanpasu64 5y ago
        To clarify things, PipeWire is an audio daemon, completely unaffiliated with https://github.com/jaakkopasanen/AutoEq https://github.com/jaakkopasanen/AutoEq which is a set of headphone impulse responses. It just so happens that the recommended way to apply these impulse responses on Linux is EasyEffects, which now depends on both PipeWire and GTK4. Nonetheless, PipeWire is not EasyEffects and not AutoEq, and "Pipewire for some reason insists on using GTK4 for its UI though" is untrue because EasyEffects is not PipeWire's official GUI, and doesn't even come up when I search `pipewire gui`. I haven't tested EasyEffects. With that in mind, PipeWire is buggy AF for the time being, and I've been working over the past week to clean things up (fixed a few bugs in plasmashell and pipewire so far, but I'm still learning and there's a great deal of bugs I haven't diagnosed and explained to the maintainers, it will probably take weeks longer for me to work through everything, and I'd very much prefer the program was written to handle race conditions and edge cases properly, instead of leaving users to discover bugs and trace the root cause through the labyrinthine IPC-heavy event-driven codebase after the fact).
        5y ago
    - jcelerier 5y ago
      I use qjackctl as "pipewire UI", works fine
  - 2muchcoffeeman 5y ago
    Does it handle headsets correctly?
    - Tsarbomb 5y ago
      Asking the real questions here. I finally gave up on using an XPS15 with Ubuntu because I could not get over the fact it cannot do high quality bi-direction bluetooth audio. Edit: Looks like it does offer some improvments over pulseaudio: https://www.redpill-linpro.com/techblog/2021/05/31/better-bluetooth-headset-audio-with-msbc.html#:~:text=Pipewire%2C%20the%20new%20default%20audio%20subsystem%20in%20Fedora,the%20CVSD%2C%20the%20default%20codec%20used%20with%20HSP https://www.redpill-linpro.com/techblog/2021/05/31/better-bl....
    - jjoonathan 5y ago
      I finally figured out how to get bluetooth headsets to work correctly on my desktop: output to 3.5mm, 3.5mm to dedicated bluetooth transmitter. Throw hardware at the software problem, because software absolutely cannot be trusted not to foul this up. Not Windows, not linux, not pipewire, not pulse, none of it. Evidently not mac either, though I've personally never had trouble with bluetooth on mac. Bluetooth is 23 years old and its flagship application is still completely broken across huge swaths of the client/server compatibility matrix.
  - OJFord 5y ago
    I switched after seeing PRs improving Pulseaudio get shot down pretty dismissively, and iirc the would-be contributor getting fed up, abandoning it because well whatever, Pipewire. But actually, since switching the AV sync is off using my Bluetooth earphones, at least in Firefox. Curiously, I can fix it with latency adjustment in pavucontrol, but it only has an affect when the 'advanced' drop down is revealed in that tab of the menu. Close it, and it's off again. Open, and the value has persisted, and it works again. Haven't really dug into that because I've been hoping the (presumably) underlying Pipewire issue will be fixed.
    - ncmncm 5y ago
      Pipewire is not written by or maintained by the same people who did PulseAudio. Thus, such experience likely does not carry over. That is not to say Pipewire could not also be a problem, but I haven't encountered such complaints about it.
    - jjoonathan 5y ago
      Oof, I saw that PR drama too (~half of bluetooth headsets were broken, PR fixed it, got ignored for months despite loads of 3rd party attention, author got heated, maintainers show up very interested in swinging their CoC around but very uninterested in merging the fix, author gave up and left for pipewire). Pulse is still broken a year later, pipewire is fixed. So it goes.
      - int_19h 5y ago
        For the curious: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pulseaudio/pulseaudio/-/merge_requests/227 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pulseaudio/pulseaudio/-/merge...
- EMM_386 5y ago
  > Honestly, Bluetooth just isn't that good. I think you're right about this. I have a pair of JBL headphones and it will just randomly become completely garbled during a video conference under Windows. I have to disable/re-enable Bluetooth to "fix" it. It's a mess.
  - int_19h 5y ago
    Conversely, I have a couple of Bose QC35, and either one of them works with pretty much any device I tried to pair them with - Windows laptops, Android phones and tablets, and a Chromebook. So perhaps it's a QoI issue?
    - hugh-avherald 5y ago
      I've had similar issues with Bose QC35 on Windows. Currently they work -- but the settings are on a knife-edge: all it takes is an unlucky Windows update and I'll spend half a day trying to find the right services and settings to reset/reinstall to get it paired again. (Also, whenever I restart, I have to open the bluetooth troubleshooter to get them paired, though at least that always works.) I blame both Windows and Bose equally, but I also think it's a very difficult protocol to work with.
- kitsunesoba 5y ago
  I've had an issue with Windows 10 cutting off the first 0.3-0.8s of any audio that plays over Bluetooth for a while now. It's occurred across entirely different systems with entirely different bluetooth chipsets and entirely different headphones. Nothing is a surefire fix except for keeping a silent audio file playing in the background, which is ridiculous. The bug isn't that bad if all you use bluetooth headphones for is YouTube, video chat, and music but it makes Anki language learning decks with audio almost unusable.
- IshKebab 5y ago
  I think it's not that it isn't "good", it's more that it is an enormously overcomplicated design-by-committee. The spec is really complicated and downright weird in a lot of places. Kind of like they were trying out new academic ideas that weren't really practical. I'm more familiar with BLE, which is better, but even that has a completely weird "characteristics" protocol that you have to use. Want to send a big blob of data? You have to manually cut it up into 20 byte chunks to send it over "notifications". It's like they looked at the OSI model and thought "ah yes this looks right! we'll implement all the layers!"
wyuenho 5y ago
Anything below Bluetooth 5 is barely usable. The 2.4Ghz freq gets interfered by anything from fluorescent lamps, old Wi-Fi hotspots, old laptops and phones to microwave ovens, and if it's not yours, it's somebody else's. You basically have no control over whether your bluetooth devices get interfered.
reaperducer 5y ago
I used to have similar problems. It turned out to be Bluetooth congestion. When I relocated to an office away from a window that faced a public street, the problems went away.

by rudian 5y ago

fastball 5y ago

Apple is still using Broadcom chips for BT, which might be part of the problem. Doesn't really make sense for a new CPU/GPU to fix the problem, what you want is for Apple to stick in their own networking cards.

abrookewood 5y ago

I don't know that it's a Mac thing - I get similar Bluetooth issues on Windows. Honestly, Bluetooth just isn't that good.

jcelerier 5y ago
The best software stack for bluetooth audio is the one provided by Pipewire on Linux.
- m0zg 5y ago
  Pipewire for some reason insists on using GTK4 for its UI though, which hangs X cold if you use any of the popovers in it. I didn't even know it was possible to hang X like that.
  - onkoe 5y ago
    Is that an X issue or a GTK issue? Haven't heard of this before and it sounds scary
  - nyanpasu64 5y ago
    What do you mean by a Pipewire UI? It's a background daemon (or three: pipewire, a session manager, and pipewire-pulse). EDIT: Perhaps the parent means Helvum, which ldd says links to libgtk-4.so.1 => /usr/lib/libgtk-4.so.1. However, I can't figure out how to open a popover (https://python-gtk-3-tutorial.readthedocs.io/en/latest/popover.html https://python-gtk-3-tutorial.readthedocs.io/en/latest/popov...) in the app; all I can do is drag to create or break connections.
    - m0zg 5y ago
      Try to set up https://github.com/jaakkopasanen/AutoEq https://github.com/jaakkopasanen/AutoEq impulse responses for headphones, and you _will_ inevitably hang your X. Daemon isn't terribly useful on its own if you can't set it up to do what you need. So anyone considering Pipewire as a "better" alternative to anything should also know, at a minimum, that it's difficult/impossible to uninstall and buggy AF.
      - nyanpasu64 5y ago
        To clarify things, PipeWire is an audio daemon, completely unaffiliated with https://github.com/jaakkopasanen/AutoEq https://github.com/jaakkopasanen/AutoEq which is a set of headphone impulse responses. It just so happens that the recommended way to apply these impulse responses on Linux is EasyEffects, which now depends on both PipeWire and GTK4. Nonetheless, PipeWire is not EasyEffects and not AutoEq, and "Pipewire for some reason insists on using GTK4 for its UI though" is untrue because EasyEffects is not PipeWire's official GUI, and doesn't even come up when I search `pipewire gui`. I haven't tested EasyEffects. With that in mind, PipeWire is buggy AF for the time being, and I've been working over the past week to clean things up (fixed a few bugs in plasmashell and pipewire so far, but I'm still learning and there's a great deal of bugs I haven't diagnosed and explained to the maintainers, it will probably take weeks longer for me to work through everything, and I'd very much prefer the program was written to handle race conditions and edge cases properly, instead of leaving users to discover bugs and trace the root cause through the labyrinthine IPC-heavy event-driven codebase after the fact).
        5y ago
  - jcelerier 5y ago
    I use qjackctl as "pipewire UI", works fine
- 2muchcoffeeman 5y ago
  Does it handle headsets correctly?
  - Tsarbomb 5y ago
    Asking the real questions here. I finally gave up on using an XPS15 with Ubuntu because I could not get over the fact it cannot do high quality bi-direction bluetooth audio. Edit: Looks like it does offer some improvments over pulseaudio: https://www.redpill-linpro.com/techblog/2021/05/31/better-bluetooth-headset-audio-with-msbc.html#:~:text=Pipewire%2C%20the%20new%20default%20audio%20subsystem%20in%20Fedora,the%20CVSD%2C%20the%20default%20codec%20used%20with%20HSP https://www.redpill-linpro.com/techblog/2021/05/31/better-bl....
  - jjoonathan 5y ago
    I finally figured out how to get bluetooth headsets to work correctly on my desktop: output to 3.5mm, 3.5mm to dedicated bluetooth transmitter. Throw hardware at the software problem, because software absolutely cannot be trusted not to foul this up. Not Windows, not linux, not pipewire, not pulse, none of it. Evidently not mac either, though I've personally never had trouble with bluetooth on mac. Bluetooth is 23 years old and its flagship application is still completely broken across huge swaths of the client/server compatibility matrix.
- OJFord 5y ago
  I switched after seeing PRs improving Pulseaudio get shot down pretty dismissively, and iirc the would-be contributor getting fed up, abandoning it because well whatever, Pipewire. But actually, since switching the AV sync is off using my Bluetooth earphones, at least in Firefox. Curiously, I can fix it with latency adjustment in pavucontrol, but it only has an affect when the 'advanced' drop down is revealed in that tab of the menu. Close it, and it's off again. Open, and the value has persisted, and it works again. Haven't really dug into that because I've been hoping the (presumably) underlying Pipewire issue will be fixed.
  - ncmncm 5y ago
    Pipewire is not written by or maintained by the same people who did PulseAudio. Thus, such experience likely does not carry over. That is not to say Pipewire could not also be a problem, but I haven't encountered such complaints about it.
  - jjoonathan 5y ago
    Oof, I saw that PR drama too (~half of bluetooth headsets were broken, PR fixed it, got ignored for months despite loads of 3rd party attention, author got heated, maintainers show up very interested in swinging their CoC around but very uninterested in merging the fix, author gave up and left for pipewire). Pulse is still broken a year later, pipewire is fixed. So it goes.
    - int_19h 5y ago
      For the curious: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pulseaudio/pulseaudio/-/merge_requests/227 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pulseaudio/pulseaudio/-/merge...
EMM_386 5y ago
> Honestly, Bluetooth just isn't that good. I think you're right about this. I have a pair of JBL headphones and it will just randomly become completely garbled during a video conference under Windows. I have to disable/re-enable Bluetooth to "fix" it. It's a mess.
- int_19h 5y ago
  Conversely, I have a couple of Bose QC35, and either one of them works with pretty much any device I tried to pair them with - Windows laptops, Android phones and tablets, and a Chromebook. So perhaps it's a QoI issue?
  - hugh-avherald 5y ago
    I've had similar issues with Bose QC35 on Windows. Currently they work -- but the settings are on a knife-edge: all it takes is an unlucky Windows update and I'll spend half a day trying to find the right services and settings to reset/reinstall to get it paired again. (Also, whenever I restart, I have to open the bluetooth troubleshooter to get them paired, though at least that always works.) I blame both Windows and Bose equally, but I also think it's a very difficult protocol to work with.
kitsunesoba 5y ago
I've had an issue with Windows 10 cutting off the first 0.3-0.8s of any audio that plays over Bluetooth for a while now. It's occurred across entirely different systems with entirely different bluetooth chipsets and entirely different headphones. Nothing is a surefire fix except for keeping a silent audio file playing in the background, which is ridiculous. The bug isn't that bad if all you use bluetooth headphones for is YouTube, video chat, and music but it makes Anki language learning decks with audio almost unusable.
IshKebab 5y ago
I think it's not that it isn't "good", it's more that it is an enormously overcomplicated design-by-committee. The spec is really complicated and downright weird in a lot of places. Kind of like they were trying out new academic ideas that weren't really practical. I'm more familiar with BLE, which is better, but even that has a completely weird "characteristics" protocol that you have to use. Want to send a big blob of data? You have to manually cut it up into 20 byte chunks to send it over "notifications". It's like they looked at the OSI model and thought "ah yes this looks right! we'll implement all the layers!"

wyuenho 5y ago

Anything below Bluetooth 5 is barely usable. The 2.4Ghz freq gets interfered by anything from fluorescent lamps, old Wi-Fi hotspots, old laptops and phones to microwave ovens, and if it's not yours, it's somebody else's. You basically have no control over whether your bluetooth devices get interfered.

reaperducer 5y ago

I used to have similar problems. It turned out to be Bluetooth congestion. When I relocated to an office away from a window that faced a public street, the problems went away.