Pi zero W bluetooth sound not working

1

I want to get sound out of a bluetooth speaker.

I can pair and connect a variety of bluetooth speakers but have had no luck getting a sound file to be audible.

I can get sound out via GPIO 13 and a simple audio filter circuit attached to a powered speaker using VLC as the player.

However I would much prefer to be able to get sound out of a remote bluetooth powered speaker.

The problem seems to involve redirecting the sound to the BCM2835 module.

Has anyone had success in doing this.

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2

Hi,

This assumes you either have Raspbian Stretch installed or have installed bluealsa separately.

Once the speakers are paired and connected, you can then redirect a specific program’s sound to the bluealsa device, for instance you could do:

aplay -D bluealsa:HCI=hci0,DEV=XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX,PROFILE=a2dp sound.wav

where XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX is the MAC address of the speakers.

I believe you can also right click the sound icon in the top right corner and select bluetooth, but I don’t have a bluetooth headset with me to try this out for you (will check when I get home tonight though).

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I checked my Pi at home, when you right click the sound icon in the top corner, you can select the bluetooth speakers by name, not just the generic “Bluetooth” I thought it might be. This then sends all system sound to the bluetooth device.

Hope that helps, let me know if you still can’t get your speakers working.

4

Josh,
Which pi did you try. I am using a zero w. It sees the bt speaker, pairs as well but does not send sound to it. One writer proposed if you connect to a monitor using hdmi the pi zero directs its sound output to hdmi and not to bt. Could this be possible. If so is there any raspbian command sequence to redirect sound to bt.

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I tried this on a Pi 3+, but it should be exactly the same for a Pi Zero W. If the HDMI is connected, it will direct the sound there by default. You can change this by right clicking the sound icon in the top corner and selecting your bluetooth speakers to send all sound, or by telling your particular program to send its sound to the bluealsa device (for VLC you should be able to change this in the settings dialog).