PulseAudio has a new reviewer! Georg Chini was frustrated with slow reviews, and offered to share some of the workload. More people should do that! Georg’s review work has already been very helpful.
I reviewed a patch from Christian Kellner that inverts the priorities that PulseAudio assigns to sinks and sources. The priorities are used for choosing the default sink or source when the user hasn’t manually selected anything. For some reason PCI sound cards previously had higher priority than USB sound cards, and bluetooth devices had the lowest priority of all. Now the priorities are inverted, which means that when a USB sound card is plugged in or a bluetooth device is connected, that will automatically become the new default sink and/or source.
I reviewed a patch (originally from Wim Taymans, resubmitted by Georg Chini) that adds support for the headset role of the bluetooth HSP profile. This means that now any computer running PulseAudio can pretend to be a bluetooth headset. Similar functionality was already available with the HFP profile, though. The benefits of supporting also the HSP headset role are that some devices might not support HFP (that’s a small set, though), and unlike HFP, HSP doesn’t require oFono between PulseAudio and BlueZ.
The parameter syntax of the “auto_switch” argument of module-bluetooth-policy was changed some time ago. I wrote a patch that adds compatibility with the old syntax, so that old configuration files keep working after upgrading to PulseAudio 11.0.
I fixed a bug in the logic that PulseAudio uses to delay initializing bluetooth devices until all profiles are connected. If a device were to first connect e.g. HSP, and then for some reason disconnect it, and then connect A2DP, a crash would happen.
As usual, I also reviewed some patches that I didn’t report individually above due to not being that noteworthy, investigated bugs, and discussed things on the mailing list, bug tracker and IRC.
This post was originally written on 2017-04-05, and first made available to my Patreon supporters. Speaking of Patreon – I’m using crowdfunding in an attempt to make it financially sustainable to continue my volunteer work as a PulseAudio maintainer. If you’d like to help, check out my Patreon page.
Tanu's Blog 