Hi all,
I have a problem/issue with the volume control when using my bluetooth earplugs.
I am using Universal Blue’s Aurora, but it also happened when I used Fedora Kinoite, Fedora KDE, openSUSE Tumbleweed KDE, etc, etc. The one thing which all these distros have in common is the KDE desktop, so I thought it would be best to start a thread here.
When I use my wired connected loudspeakers I can use volume control in the panel to select any volume I want. The height of the volume can be adjusted between 0 and 100% and that is also what I hear. When watching a video in the browser, or as I do now, listen to Spotify in the browser I don’t need to use the volume sliders for the Application (browser) nor the one in the webpage, the volume icon in the panel does it all and does it well.
When I connect my Bluetooth plugs, and have the volume for the Application (browser) and the one on the webpage both set to 100% (as I have when speakers are connected) the panel volume slider can lower the volume a little when sliding to the left end of the scale, but it is not lowering it enough. When set at 2% the sound is still too loud to use, one more step and it is 0% which gives me no sound at all. I always need to use the slider on the webpage and set it around 50% so I can control the volume with the panel slider in a usable way.
This happened in Plasma 5.x as well as in 6.x, I am currently at Plasma 6.3.1.
I use a Lenovo Legion 5 Pro, but when using other laptops before this one I had the same problem.
The used profile is: High Fidelity playback (A2DP Sink, codec AAC)
The used earplugs are called ENV-1666. I never tried different ones because I don’t have them.
Is there a way for me to change something in my setup which makes it usable, is it a bug (which would mean more people would have this issue)?
You had the right idea! Other things they have in common are bluez and pipewire, and that’s likely where your problem lies.
You probably want to bring this up as a pipewire issue, but you can’t do that right now because freedesktop.org is down for the week (good luck you guys!!)
If I had to take a guess with this info, I’d say that there is a problem with hardware volume control for this device. Some bluetooth headsets have this disabled by a ‘quirk’, so maybe your headset needs to be added to the quirks list.
You can make the change manually for now, for testing, and if it works, then you can report that to pipewire when they’re back, and they’ll fix it so that in future, and for others, it just works.
This is a quick and dirty way to try it, just for testing:
And you’ll be back to how it is now, no harm done.
You’ll need to restart wireplumber for example with systemctl --user restart wireplumber but frankly, I’d just reboot it instead, to be sure. See if there is any change in behaviour (even if it isn’t good) and let me know, I’ll give you a better plan to move forward.
Wow, this did the job. Thank you so very much. Sorry for the late answer but work kept me busy the whole week so no time for my hobby.
After I rebooted I tested it out and I first thought, no this doesn’t work. I could hear nothing, no music at all. I already copied the line to remove it all into the terminal when I suddenly heard some music but extremely soft. I increased the volume to its maximum and maximum is a level which my ears can handle. You sir, made my day. Thank you very much.
I followed the link in your answer and got on a webpage but I see nothing about pipewire, either the website is not yet back online as it should be, or I don’t search well enough.