balenaSound blueooth audio on Raspberry Pi 3: Sound skipping, dropping

hi all, first post, but thought i’d mention what worked for me here as I was having the same issues as others pi 3 with packets being dropped and garbled sound. it started happening for me right after setting the BLUETOOTH_DEVICE_NAME variable to a custom value. after restarting and rebooting both my pi, spotify, and my phone, I still had the issue. I then deleted the variable and allowed the default value to be set, cranked the volume back up in alsamixer, restarted spotify, and I was back to smooth sound and no dropped packets. thoughts? anyone else want to try?

Hey @hifipi,

welcome to the forums, and thank you for your post!
I linked this conversation to a balena-sound issue that seems to be related to the problem described in the thread. Once one of the maintainers of balena-sound is able to test out your suggestion and reports their results in the github issue, a support agent will be notified so we can share any progress with you on this thread.
Thanks again for contributing, will get back to you as soon as we have any updates.

Hi,

Just wanted to chime in since I’ve been working on this issue for a few hours now. I’m on an RPi3 and started on balenaOS v2.47.0+rev1 and ran into the bluetooth issues mentioned above. Some log extracts:

  • /usr/bin/bluealsa: SBC decoding error: No such file or directory
  • /usr/bin/bluealsa: Missing RTP packet: 1780 != 1778

I tried messing with config variables (turning bluetooth or wifi off at boot etc.) to no avail, and eventually started downgrading balenaOS to see if that was the issue, following a tip from this issue https://github.com/balenalabs/balena-sound/issues/47. v2.38.0+rev1 was the version where bluetooth started working properly for me, so it would seem that bluetooth got broken in following versions for the RPi3, perhaps when support for RPi4 was added?

Hope this is helpful to some of you and that this might get fixed in an update since v2.38.0 is technically “outdated” and might be less secure.

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Many thanks for this additional information. I see you also updated the GitHub issue here https://github.com/balenalabs/balena-sound/issues/62 so we’ll update that issue and this forum thread when we have a resolution.

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Hi! I got the same issue with BLUETOOTH_DEVICE_NAME. Deleting the variable solved the problem.

Hey, thanks for letting us know. We’ll add this to our tracker to hopefully solve it soon.

Thank you. This was the solution for me. My External USB dongle did not have firmware available so not an option (at least not without building my own OS).

Would be interesting to know what changed between the two OS versions

Dear developers,

This is my first post on Balena and I’d like to share my experience on this issue.

First of all, thank you very much. Balena is an awesome project and it works out of the box for me. However, I did experience this issue (packet skipping and dropping) and, as a result, the audio sound discontinued.

After downgrading to balenaOS 2.38.0+rev1, it seems to work now.

Thank you

I’m also experiencing the issue. I’ll share my experience regarding the suggestion to use the outdated 2.38 version: I tried it and I noticed the performance is somewhat better, but still not perfect. My audio files are of high quality and I still get jitters every minute or so.

I have a workaround I’m attempting to explore now: https://github.com/piCorePlayer/firmware-rpi-wireless/commit/7d926a074484e1b43974273a0cdeed9cf3daff9c Taken from the Arch Wiki: https://archlinuxarm.org/platforms/armv8/broadcom/raspberry-pi-3

Also, the correct device variable to disable bluetooth on rpi3 is RESIN_HOST_CONFIG_dtoverlay and pi3-disable-bt
The only solution for skipping audio is a usb bluetooth stick.
Please write a correct answer for a solution, and not maybe, because many people try without success, obviously.