Saturday, January 24, 2015

Solved: Mono output to Bluetooth speaker on Fedora 21

I purchased a Jam Rewind bluetooth speaker over a month ago (November 2014?).  It works great with my Samsung Galaxy S4.  The speaker works great whenever I attach it to my 2 Android tablets.  I have not used it on either of my 2 laptops that have Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 nor my Lenovo IdeaTab Lynx K3011 tablet but I am sure it will sound great there also.

My two Acer laptops that run Windows (7 & 8.1) have Fedora 21 installed on each of them.  When I pair the Jam Rewind speaker to them, the resulting output is terrible.  I did some checking with the PulseAudio Volume Control and I found out that the Jam Rewind was using mono profile.


I did some Googling and determined that I needed an A2DP profile for the device.  I did more Googling and came  across an Ask Ubuntu post on StackExchange had a configuration option on PulseAudio Volume control.  I checked and on my Fedora 21 PulseAudio Volume Control there was a tab for selecting different profiles for the Jam Rewind:


Selecting the High Fidelity Playback (A2DP Sink) the sound out of the Jam Rewind is exceptional.   I was almost ready to give up on this one.  Good thing I don't give up too easy.


Monday, January 19, 2015

Phone calls stopped after first call: Samsung Galaxy S4

Today, I had 5 meetings at work.  I normally use my work issued Samsung Galaxy S4 and my Plantronics bluetooth headset with all my conference calls.  This has worked great for the past couple of years but today I noticed that after my first call, I when I dialed my next call, I did not hear the conference call lady ask me for my conference code.  This seemed strange.  I called my wifes phone but did not hear any ringing on my end.  My wife stopped in my office awhile later and said she saw I called.

I rebooted my cell phone (power off then physically powered it on, never trusted reboot but on the S4 it appears reboot does the same thing) and I was able to connect to my next call using my bluetooth headset.  I thought problem solved!  Nope.  The next call same symptoms, no ring or conference call-in lady's voice.  I suspect if I called my wife she would answer and not hear me.  Again, a reboot of the phone fixed the problem.

I did some experimenting and discovered that as long as I did not use the bluetooth headset, my calls would work.  Once I used the bluetooth headset for a call, that disabled my voice and microphone from the bluetooth headset AND from my phone (I disconnected the headset and still had the same problem).

Removing the battery, SIM card and SD card and replacing them did not solve the problem.  Calls worked fine until I connected the bluetooth headset and made a call. After that, any call, with or without the headset failed.

Googling for answers showed some promise.  One solution was to TURN OFF Google Drive.  I did that and even rebooted the phone. Same problem.

The solution?  Turn off the "OK Google" feature.  I recall that over the weekend, I disabled Google Now function and I think I enabled "OK Google" on all pages.  There was a reference to "OK, Google" causing this problem when I was Googling.  I had to reboot the phone for the "OK, Google" to be disabled and to be able to make calls with the bluetooth headset.

I'll probably keep "OK, Google" disabled just like I disabled "Google Now".  They are neat features but I don't really use them all that much.