Bluetooth quality is really bad on galaxy buds

General
#1

I am using galaxy buds as my wireless headphones, I didn’t really have a problem with them until I got on Sailfishos and the quality is way worse than my previous android device.

I am not sure if it’s the headphones fault or sailfishos/pulseaudio’s fault, I saw that it supports a2dp so it theory it should be fine, but at the same time the headphones worked fine on my old phone.

Also the volume is really low, and I am the type who listens at a pretty high volume usually, this is quite bothersome and pushing setting the sink volume to a higher volume makes it really distorted.

I can usually get over the other inconveniences, but audio quality is a pretty big thing for me and I want to be able to listen to decent quality on my phone.

#2

can you describe the issue in more details, please?
what means “bad quality”? For what I understand you are unsatisfied with the codec (i.e. sample rate) and AFAIK there was discussion about implementing more decent one either in sailfish or in pulseaudio … I am not sure anymore where I read it. I follow the BT topic as I have few use cases based on it and I am also not very satisfied in the quality (may be in another meaning of the word).

#3

a2dp may be available, but that’s just the transport; the fancier codecs like AptX only just (27 jul) got added to pulseaudio. Sailfish is doing a pretty good job on staying up to date, so i’m hoping for something like early next year.

I can definitely sympathise, since i switched to nicer headphones… current codec really is quite boring.
As for volume; do note that most (all?) devices have some sort of weird series volume, one volume on the phone, that is than basically multiplied with that on the headphones. For whatever reason this silly trend of “true wireless” (mine are too) seems to make the device volume much more inaccessible. Does the volume-up on the headphones do anything?

#4

if you are skilled enough you could easily compile pulseaudio from source. I did it few years ago until they ¶ fixed few issues with BT in v12.x and Sailfish was still on v11.x.

#5

I did try to, but I got stuck on an error mesaage right at the last thing, when I compile it using meson. I didn’t find anything on the web, I updated to the latest libs, got every dependancy, but nothing.

#6

don’t understand what you mean, but compile in the Sailfish SDK