Bluetooth works, after a fashion. Not well enough for everyday use, though. I’ll document the difficulties I ran into, in the hopes that’s useful for improving the integration.
This is on a Pi 4B 2GB with built-in Bluetooth, Max2Play 2.51.
SqueezeLite completely „loses the plot“ when it auto-disconnects from the Bluetooth output device. Won’t play music any more / disappears as a selectable player. That’s the default „-C 5“ setting. Removing that setting resolved those issues.
SqueezeLite can’t start when there are no speakers connected – the Bluetooth ALSA device alone isn’t sufficient.
Bluetooth will not automatically connect to a known speaker when it’s in range, this has to be done manually.
Taken together, this means that Bluetooth support isn’t, in its current form, terribly useful.
Whenever the RaspPi or the speakers restart, the Bluetooth device will lose connection to the speakers and won’t automatically re-enable. SqueezeLite will probably go into a funk as well. That means go into Max2play web interface, manually „Connect“ the speakers, bounce SqueezeLite, then play music.
To be seamless, what I’d expect is:
– After pairing speakers once, Bluetooth / Max2Play will connect to them whenever they become available – similar to how phones behave
– SqueezeLite can survive the speakers being gone, and can start or keep running when Bluetooth is available but the speakers are not
– Bluetooth / Squeezelite survive Squeezelite auto-disconnecting from the output device? Optional – alternatively just make sure that the default command line when bluetooth is in use is blank, not „-C 5“.
That way, I could play music whenever I want, just by turning the speakers on.
Happily, I have other ways of connecting to these speakers: I’ll use HDMI for the AVC, and a HifiBerry Digi+ HAT and optical cable for other Bluetooth-enabled speakers in the house.
Debug output for good measure
`
#### Bluetooth Installation ####
#### Bluetooth Dongle ####
hci0: Type: Primary Bus: UART
BD Address: DC:A6:32:0D:A1:9F ACL MTU: 1021:8 SCO MTU: 64:1
UP RUNNING
RX bytes:96030 acl:63 sco:0 events:11581 errors:0
TX bytes:16935323 acl:22814 sco:0 commands:161 errors:0
#### DEVICE Marantz SR5012 ####
[00:05:CD:E5:9C:19]
Name: Marantz SR5012
Alias: Marantz SR5012 [rw]
Address: 00:05:CD:E5:9C:19
Icon: audio-card
Class: 0x240414
Paired: 1
Trusted: 1 [rw]
Blocked: 0 [rw]
Connected: 1
UUIDs: [AudioSink, AVRemoteControlTarget, AVRemoteControl, PnPInformation, 00001800-0000-1000-8000-00805f9b34fb, 00001801-0000-1000-8000-00805f9b34fb]
#### BLUEALSA RUNNING ####
1
`
