I listen to music through a Sandstrom bluetooth speaker which has always worked well on the Unity desktop environment. However, I recently changed to Gnome for other reasons and now I'm having real bluetooth connection problems. When I first switched environment I couldn't connect the speaker until I installed pulseaudio-module-bluetooth. I can now pair and connect to the speaker but each time I restart my laptop it loses the connection, so I have to run the enable pulse audio and start pulse audio each time in order to connect the speaker. I have set the main.conf to autoenable=true but it makes no difference, and I've also tried setting FastConnectable to true but again with no difference in behaviour. I installed bluez but that doesn't seem to have made any difference either.
That's not such a problem, but when I stop using the bluetooth speaker I cannot then run any video or audio on my laptop without having to shut everything else down and re-boot, which is a complete pain. This applies whether it's online content like the BBC or local media on VLC media player, just nothing will even start playing until I reboot. I'm assuming it's some sort of conflict between pipewire and pulse audio but I don't know where to start diagnosing. Can anyone advise me please?
I'm using an ASUS Vivobook running Ubuntu 22.04.4 LTS 64-bit, Gnome version 42.9 with Wayland.
Managed to temporarily resolve it by following the instructions here:https://gist.github.com/the-spyke/2de98b22ff4f978ebf0650c90e82027e?permalink_comment_id=3976215But actually this turned out to only work for about 30 seconds before disconnecting itself which led to hours more googling about "br-connection-page-timeout" errors. There are so many rabbit-holes to fall down when searching for answers about Ubuntu's 'half-implementation' of pipewire that it's probably better just giving up on it.