Connecting to Bluetooth Speaker in Linux in 2024

One might think that by the second half of 2024, bluetooth speakers would work on linux seamlessly.

There are two things I’m absolutely terrified of connecting to my linux computer. A printer, and a bluetooth device.

Today I dared myself and decided to connect my “Resound” football shaped speaker. I started the bluetooth.service with systemd. I could see the device listed in the KDE Plasma bluetooth applet (maybe I had already “paired” this one previously). When I clicked “Connect” it actually said “Your device is connected”. It was working!

And then I decided to be stupid and changed the speaker to “FM mode” to listen to some radio. Once I was convinced that that was a bad idea, I came back to bluetooth mode. And tried connecting from the plasma applet again. Unfortunately, I had messed it up.

I tried the usual, switched off the device, restarted bluetooth service. I didn’t want to turn off my computer.

So, I thought, maybe I can actually debug this, and went into sudo journalctl -f -u bluetooth. When it failed to connect, it failed with this error: “Unable to get Hands-Free Voice gateway SDP record: Host is down”.

Searching that led me to this issue on bluez from 2022 in which Sharelter commented:

I repaired by bluetooth yesterday by edit /etc/bluetooth/main.conf to change ControllerMode = bredrand and replaced pulse-bluetooth with pipewire-pulse to get aptX support.

I didn’t know what ControllerMode was, so I searched for that and found one, two StackOverflow answers which talks about something like Bluetooth 4.0, low energy, and so on. I surmised that since this is a pretty cheap speaker, it must not be having whatever new thing is, and followed Sharelter’s solution.

I edited /etc/bluetooth/main.conf and set ControllerMode to bredrandSharelter’s solution.

I edited /etc/bluetooth/main.conf and set ControllerMode to bredrand. And then I did sudo systemctl restart bluetooth and it magically connected to the speaker immediately and started playing from it!