GoogleAssistant, Raspotify and bluetooth audio...

Stinger0815

Hello again,
I finally had some time to work on my beloved mirror again - however, I feel like I’ve messed it up and wanted to reach out to you guys for advice since my google and forum search efforts are not fruitful any longer…

Sorry if this becomes a long post again…

So - what I’m trying to achieve is having google assistant integrated with Raspotify and play music via my connected bluetooth speaker. Thanks to @bugsounet this is working nearly perfect.

I installed everything like raspotify, the google assistant etc. and it worked like a charm - youtube was playing using my speaker, raspotify was playing using anything but my speaker…

So I googled and figured out that raspotify seems to have issues with bluetooth connected devices…

And thats where the mess started - I stumbled over this: https://github.com/bablokb/pi-btaudio which sounded like it could do the job - I installed it and it completely f****ed up all my audio stuff. I figured it doesn’t like pulseaudio - fine, I uninstalled it. Still does not work. So I continued my google search - seems I thought that the problem is maybe that it does indeed set the default audio play device but completely ignores input devices…

I found the micConfig stuff here:
http://wiki.bugsounet.fr/en/MMM-GoogleAssistant/Tools
but thats not working any longer, guess it is not required any longer…

Further googling led me to change the /etc/asound.conf file to:

pcm.!default "bluealsa"
ctl.!default "bluealsa"
defaults.bluealsa.interface "hci0"
defaults.bluealsa.device "XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX"
defaults.bluealsa.profile "a2dp"

pcm.!default
{
    type asym
    playback.pcm
    {
        type plug
        slave.pcm "bluealsa"
    }
    capture.pcm
    {
        type plug
        slave.pcm "hw:2,0"
    }
}

Since I’m absolutely new to this I fear that this might already be confusing since it looks to me like I’m defining the default pcm device twice - once with “bluealsa” (something that comes from the installed “pi-btaudio” - so I’ve no idea whats actually done there) as well as once with the split between playback and capture device…

However - with that the mirror is at least “working” again… but the audio capturing is completely random now - its barely reacting to the hotwords.
Furthermore I cannot control the volume any longer.
The mirror is randomly restarting every 10 minutes.
The mirror in general is extremely “laggy” and unresponsive.
And last but not least raspotify is still not working :weary_face:

I’m now contemplating how to move on. I could try to get rid of the “pi-btaudio” stuff since this is where all the mess started and reinstall pulseaudio. I could try to still fix the issue - maybe something still not working proberly with the config… Or try something else?

If anybody has a thought how I can proceed I’m more than thankful for any help.

Best regards

DJBOOB66

Before all this did you test Spotify before trying BT speaker the reason I ask this is I just did a fresh install of bullseye and MM, GA, and I had to start Spotify on my phone and pick the MM as the playing device before it would play thou MM audio?

bugsounet

With bluetooth, raspotify need many root permission, so it’s very complex…
I advice you to try with librespot, works with no problem with bluetooth [without config] (don’t forget to uninstall raspotify)

after if you override asound.conf … I don’t guarantee the result
in my case, works with default config

Stinger0815

@bugsounet said in GoogleAssistant, Raspotify and bluetooth audio...:

With bluetooth, raspotify need many root permission, so it’s very complex…
I advice you to try with librespot, works with no problem with bluetooth [without config] (don’t forget to uninstall raspotify)

after if you override asound.conf … I don’t guarantee the result
in my case, works with default config

Thanks! I’ll give it a try and let you know how it worked in a few days…

Stinger0815

@djboob66 Spotify itself worked flawless - regardless where I started it. It simply used any other audio (my monitor since it unfortunately has some crappy speakers inside) and did not wanted to use my BT-Audio at all.