I had quite a lot of difficulties connecting my new wireless in-ear headphones/earphones/TWS (mine are Sony WX-1000XM3) to my linux devices. For my computers using Pipewire it would pair without any issues, but for those using Pulseaudio I had to go on a search engine rabbit hole to find answers.
Those instructions were successfully tested with my Sony WF-1000XM3 headphones, but should also work for similar devices (like the Sony WF-1000XM4).
Reminder: you need to connect to the “WF-1000XM3” device, not the device called “LE-WF-1000XM3”. It won’t work if you connect to the LE device, be aware you might have to wait a little bit for the normal “WF-1000XM3” device to be detected.
After connecting, you might need to manually select your bluetooth devices in your sound mixer. I personally use pavucontrol.
If you’re searching for a nice bluetooth front-end, I recommend blueman.
If your computer uses Pipewire
I personnally didn’t have any issue with my laptop running pipewire. Everything worked out of the box.
If your computer uses Pulseaudio
I have two computers running Pulseaudio with a different configuration:
- Desktop PC (Archlinux / Gnome)
- Work laptop (Ubuntu 21.10)
On my desktop PC I followed the instructions on the Archwiki to install the bluetooth stack: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Bluetooth
sudo pacman -S bluez bluez-utils
# optional
sudo pacman -S blueman
sudo systemctl enable --now bluetooth
and applied the recommendations from this post on archlinux.org forums: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=262251
The relevant part is about installing bluez-hid2hci, qt5-connectivity and pulseaudio-bluetooth (this one was already installed on my computer).
You might only need to install bluez-hid2hci, but I also installed qt5-connectivity for the sake of it.
On my ubuntu work laptop I followed the instructions from this post on askubuntu.com: https://askubuntu.com/questions/1232159/ubuntu-20-04-no-sound-out-of-bluetooth-headphones
The relevant part is about moving the old pulseaudio configuration:
mv ~/.config/pulse/ ~/.config/pulse.old
For both computers, I was able to successfully connect to my headphones after a reboot.
Hope it works for you!
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