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Comment by jeroenhd | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps interesting to note: on Linux, you can also enable higher bitrate SBC audio (though something dubbed "SBC XQ"). Similarly, "mSBC" can be used for higher quality headset audio (still nowhere close to SBC or more APTX, of course).

I hope someone over at Google merges this, or something like this, already. Better audio codec are supported by tons of headphones and such, but support is not universal and bidirectional audio improvements definitely aren't.

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This is a 4 year old article that predates things like LE Audio support for which has been merged into Android.

Does that definitely negate the value in merging this?

I'm not up on the distinctions here but it seems like people may have older headphones where this could still result in improved quality and it seems like low hanging fruit.

It also predates the Bluetooth headset audio spec update that came out a few weeks ago. Hasn’t reached hardware yet, though.

Do you know how to enable that on Linux?

Or how to check what my current headset is using?

I remember I had previously a patched pulseaudio that exposed appropriate settings, but later it got "merged into mainstream" - and I couldn't find the settings or information what is being used.

I use Wireplumber+Pipewire on Ubuntu and Manjaro. I stuffed the following into /etc/wireplumber/bluetooth.lua.d/bluez_monitor.properties :

    bluez_monitor.properties = {
      ["bluez5.enable-msbc"] = true,
      ["bluez5.enable-sbc-xq"] = true,
      ["bluez5.enable-hw-volume"] = true,
      ["bluez5.headset-roles"] = "[ hsp_hs hsp_ag hfp_hf hfp_ag ]",
      ["bluez5.codecs"] = "[ sbc sbc_xq aac ldac aptx aptx_hd aptx_II aptx_II_duplex faststream faststream_duplex ]",
    }

Then from the GNOME audio settings I can pick the appropriate codec from the dropdown.

I have a pair of Oneplus buds (the older ones, with a wire in between them) so I don't get any of the newer codecs, but SBC-XQ works well for reducing latency in a pinch.

Pulseaudio also has support, but I don't know how to make that work. My last attempt led me to switch to Pipewire.

> Or how to check what my current headset is using?

`pactl list` should show you all your input and output sinks and what profiles they are using. Even though, I think the pulseaudio Volume Control app also shows this graphically.

Something like `pactl set-card-profile bluez_card.98_52_3D_7E_5D_DE a2dp-sink-sbc_xq` sets the profile to sbc xq. This is a bit old and I am not sure if newer versions of pipewire have better ways of doing it.

Not sure about Gnome, but in KDE you can select the codec from a drop-down in volume panel for a while now. I got high quality headset audio with low delay for at least 2 releases of Fedora.

If you're on a distro which has migrated to pipewire+wireplumber, the available and active bluetooth profiles can be discovered with something like:

  pw-dump | jq -r '.[] | select(.type == "PipeWire:Interface:Device" and .info.props."device.bus" == "bluetooth") | .info.params.Props, .info.params.PropInfo'

And by default, wireplumber will enable all of the codecs it has been built with [https://pipewire.pages.freedesktop.org/wireplumber/configura...].

I’m struggling so hard just to even barely support Airpods in Linux :’)

I use Linux Mint with airpods no problem -- what are you running into? Are you just trying to pair and use as audio sync or also read battery levels?

Just pairing them seems impossible. Is there any guide that you found helpful?

I can't say I followed any guide because they just paired like any other bt peripheral. Have you had success with any other Bluetooth devices?

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