Connecting Bluetooth Headphones

I recently picked up a pair of Bluetooth headphones (Mixcder ShareMe 7) for use with my laptop (which runs Linux Mint). Getting them to connect properly was a bit of an adventure. After I had things (mostly) sorted out, I decided to script the steps necessary to get them working so that I could just double-click a script file and let it do the bulk of the work for me. I thought I'd pass along my script (and some background) here in case it helps anyone else. Note that what follows works on Mint, and probably (maybe? hopefully?) on other Debian-based distributions of Linux. Windows and Mac users may need to look elsewhere.

Preliminaries

I already had Bluetooth support installed on the laptop. (It did not come with the basic Mint installation.) On top of the drivers, I installed the blueman and bluez-tools packages from the Canonical repositories (using Synaptic). The former provides a nice graphic user interface for managing Bluetooth connections, while the latter provides some handy command line tools.

The first step was to pair the headphones with the laptop. It's fairly easy to do using blueman, and I won't bother with the details here (especially since I've already forgotten them). One thing I will mention is that, during the pairing, I was asked for a PIN code for the headphones. I couldn't find it in the otherwise extensive (and multilingual) manual, though I may have missed it. At any rate, the common default choice for headsets and many other Bluetooth devices worked: 0000.

A couple of other things need to be noted that might be peculiar to my setup. First, I have a command that runs at startup and turns off the Bluetooth service. I do that to conserve battery power, since I don't use Bluetooth all that often on the laptop. Second, my laptop has better than average battery life but isn't exactly a portable supercomputer. I had to stick a pause in the script below due to a timing issue. Whether others would have the same timing issue, and whether they would need the same duration pause, a longer one or a shorter one, is an empirical question. (In other words, caveat emptor.)

Information you will need

You will need the name by which Bluetooth knows your headset, and the name of the "card" (adapter) it uses. After you have paired your headset, and with Bluetooth and the headset turned on, open a terminal and run the command 'bt-device --list'. That will produce one line of output for each device it sees. The format for each line is the device name ("Mixcder ShareMe 7" for my headset) followed by a MAC address in parentheses. Note down the name and MAC address. Due to paranoia, I won't list the actual MAC address of my headset; we'll just call it E8:99:FF:22:76:44 (which I just made up).

Setup script 

I run this script (by double-clicking it, or invoking it in a terminal, depending on my mood) after turning on the headphones:

#!/bin/bash
# Script to connect Mixcder headphones as audio sink.
# Note: turn on the headphones first!
#
# Unblock the Bluetooth adapter (blocked by startup script)
gksudo rfkill unblock bluetooth
# Load the Bluetooth discovery module.
pactl load-module module-bluetooth-discover
# Pause a few seconds -- attempting to connect immediately fails
# (timing issue?)
sleep 5
# Connect to the headphones.
# (Ignore a "did not receive a reply" error -- seems harmless.)
bt-audio -c "Mixcder ShareMe 7"
# Make sure the headphones use the audio sink (A2DP) profile, not the
# telephony profile (or the turned off "profile")
pactl set-card-profile bluez_card.E8_99_FF_22_76_44 a2dp

• The call to rfkill (which requires superuser privileges) turns Bluetooth back on. You will not need that if you leave Bluetooth on by default.
• The next line loads the Bluetooth discovery module, which is apparently necessary for Bluetooth to find the headphones.
• After that, I have the script take a five second nap to let the discovery module do some discovering. (The default time unit for sleep is seconds.) As I mentioned above, five seconds seems to work for my laptop; your mileage may vary (or you may not need this at all).
• The call to bt-audio connects the headset. Substitute the name of your device (collected in the previous section), in quotes, if you're not using a Mixcder ShareMe 7.
• Finally, the last line sets the profile for the headphones to be a high quality audio sink (meaning the microphone is turned off and the headphones act like stereo speakers). The "a2dp" is what specifies that profile. If you want your headset to act like a telephone (microphone on, lower quality sound), change "a2dp" to "hsp". Note that the "card" name is "bluez_card." followed by the MAC address (which you collected above) with the colons converted to underscores (no idea why).

If you have problems with getting the correct profile name (i.e., neither "a2dp" nor "hsp" does what you want), try running 'pactl list' in a terminal. The section of output labeled "Profiles:" lists the available profiles, giving for each one the name (e.g., "a2dp") followed by a colon and a description of it.