Bluetooth Audio on Debian

I was trying to connect my old Sony BT headphones to my Debian 12 desktop, and ran into a problem. I could enable Bluetooth and pair with them, but I couldn't connect with them. Whenever I tried to connect, I would get an error saying it couldn't connect, but without any details.

tl;dr

  1. Use bluetoothctl to try to connect and verify the error message is org.bluez.Error.Failed br-connection-profile-unavailable
  2. IF this is your error, then run sudo apt install libspa-0.2-bluetooth -y, reboot, and you should be good to go.

The GUI wasn't giving me any additional information, and I found a comment on StackExchange[1] that suggested using a bash script[2] to fix the problem. The thing that caught my eye was the bluetoothctl command-line utility he was using.

I tried to pair my headset again, and used the following commands (with comments to explain each step):

# Scan for available Bluetooth devices and find the MAC address of the device I want to pair with.
bluetoothctl scan on
## The output was a big list of devices, so I found my device and grabbed the MAC address.
# Pair my headset and computer using the headset MAC
bluetooth pair 38:18:4C:2A:5B:2B 
# Trust the headset
bluetoothctl trust 38:18:4C:2A:5B:2B
# Connect with the headset
bluetoothctl connect 38:18:4C:2A:5B:2B

When it failed, I was given an interesting and actionable output:

Attempting to connect to 3C:86:D1:2E:DE:46
Failed to connect: org.bluez.Error.Failed br-connection-profile-unavailable

I took that error, searched the internet, and found this comment saying that their solution[3] was to install the libspa-0.2-bluetooth library package and reboot.

It looks like PipeWire doesn't have the bluetooth module packaged with it by default, which I'm sure is handy for low-profile systems, but is a PITA for everyone else.

So I tried to install the package with sudo nala install libpsa-0.2-bluetooth,[4] which failed to install. I checked to see if I had Pipewire installed (which I did), and did some more looking around until I realized I had spelled the package name wrong; libpsa and not libspa.

Finally, I ran the correct command sudo nala install libspa-0.2-bluetooth, rebooted, and everything worked! Even from the GUI!

  1. Link: pulseaudio - Bluetooth headphones problem (ubuntu 16.04) - Ask Ubuntu ↩︎

  2. "It looks like you could benefit from some scripting." is an absurd thing to say when every other OS has bluetooth pairing completely figured out. ↩︎

  3. Link: [Solved] bluetooth error: br-connection-profile-unavailable - Debian User Forums ↩︎

  4. I use Nala instead of apt-get when I can, because it looks nice and is faster. ↩︎