I have bluetooth headset that I can easily connect to my KDE Neon laptop but it is not recognized as having a microphone. Here’s what I see:
AFAICT I am suing pipewire
$ pactl info | grep "Server Name"
Server Name: PulseAudio (on PipeWire 1.2.6)
What do I need to make it recognize the microphone?
Earbud mics usually, or rather used to. need a lot of fiddling and editing of things form them to show, but they don’t actually work. I think this is because there are actually multiple mics for background noise removal and noise cancellation, plus all the proprietary stuff used for this.
IF your bluetooth reveiver supports this, you might try creating a config as descriobed here. If your Bt does support this, you will see more options on the earbuds’ drop-down. Some of these may also reveal your mic, but so some testing. The sound quality may be bad on certain codecs, or not work at all.
This specific pair of earbuds have been working fine with another machine I have that also runs KDE Neon. So I know for sure that they work. In fact, I don’t remember fiddling with anything to get them to work with my other computer, which is why I was very surprised to have this issue at all.
Thanks for pointing it our to me. I didn’t quite do everything that the post suggested as I was still trying to understand (as much as I can) what to do. I saw the note about enabling battery level indicator towards the end and figured I will try that first. But that was enough to get my headset to work!
For those who may end up here because of a Google search… here’s what I did – I edited the file /etc/systemd/system/bluetooth.service.d/override.conf by doing:
sudo systemctl edit bluetooth.service
I then added the following contents to that file at a location specified in that file.
[Service]
ExecStart=
ExecStart=/usr/libexec/bluetooth/bluetoothd --experimental
Then, I restarted the bluetooth service by running sudo systemctl restart bluetooth.service.
Now, I see a battery level indicator for the headset:
And I also see additional options for headset:
Ahhh, I missed that bit of info.
For all of my Bt earbud headsets or those without boom mics ( about 6 over the past few years) , I have needed to add codec packages and edit Bluetooth configs in order to have the mics show up or have any non-phone functionality. In 24.04, all I needed to do was create the new pipewire config file with the contents shown, and my mics are both present and working.
It is good you found the solution. I wonder what enabling experimental bits will do for me… 
Interestingly, my buds and headsets all have shown battery levels without any config edits at all. 
