Hi friends,
I have installed Balena Sound OS, fleet is formed and I added my Raspberry Pi 4 device and everything is showing to run on dash board.
But when I try to connect my phone or my Firestick over Bluetooth I can’t see my device among available ones (green status, running since I started it).
Among devices I can see there is no device with the particular name ‘late-fish’ and I could not see any other device which would somehow look like my device (with the same MAC address etc).
Did I forgot to do something obvious? Please help - I would really like to employ my RPi 4 to help connect my hi-fi with Firestick … by the way, I can successfully connect by ear-buts with Firestick over Bluetooth…
Please help.
Very best regards, Branko
Update:
I see I don’t have any releases (whatever that means).
When I tried to define realise I get instructions to install and run two commands by balena-cli.
I have installed balena-cli to my Windows computer, and I know where is installed, but I don’t know how to start it, and where to paste those two commands.
Please help.
Update 2:
I have managed to deploy Balena Sound Realise with balena dashboard
And it says Success.
But I still don’t see Balena Sound among Bluetooth available devices when I try to pair it with Firestick or my Android phone.
What now?
Update 3:
In device log I can see some errors:
-multiple times:
multiroom-client 2022-03-18 13-47-35.437 [Error] (Connection) Failed to connect to host ‘192.168.0.25’, error: Connection refused
multiroom-client 2022-03-18 13-47-35.438 [Error] (Controller) Error: Connection refused
multiroom-client 2022-03-18 13-47-35.438 [Error] (Connection) Error in socket shutdown: Socket not connected
Then there are messages:
sound-supervisor Error connecting to audio block - Retry failed: connect ECONNREFUSED 192.168.0.25:4317
audio Setting audio routing rules…
audio Routing ‘balena-sound.input’ to ‘snapcast’.
audio Routing ‘balena-sound.output’ to ‘0’.
audio W: [pulseaudio] main.c: This program is not intended to be run as root (unless --system is specified).
audio E: [pulseaudio] main.c: Daemon startup without any loaded modules, refusing to work.
Then multiple times:
multiroom-client 2022-03-18 13-47-47.454 [Error] (Connection) Failed to connect to host ‘192.168.0.25’, error: Connection refused
multiroom-client 2022-03-18 13-47-47.454 [Error] (Controller) Error: Connection refused
multiroom-client 2022-03-18 13-47-47.454 [Error] (Connection) Error in socket shutdown: Socket not connected
And then:
Restarting service ‘audio
sha256:d2019c5c23900a00bedd29f96ee4c75ed02d76350bf75c19f069a1422de0997c’
Does this tell someone what is wrong and how to make it work? Please.
Dear Balena sound gurus, I see some people have seen my post, but I didn’t receive any answers (no additional questions, ideas for resolving the problem …). I’m wondering if that means that I need to go to paid plan to receive some help, or I should simply conclude Balena sound is not a good solution for me?
Again please help.
Hello Branko, thank you for your patience, sometimes it does take us a few days to be able to get to all of the Forum posts. Regarding your particular issue, two quick experiments can help us narrow down any issues…
First, it might be worth attempting to run a fresh build and letting your device try again to re-download the containers and run the application. You can trigger a new build easily, by clicking on the blue “Deploy with balena” button on the GitHub repo located here: GitHub - balenalabs/balena-sound: Build a single or multi-room streamer for an existing audio device using a Raspberry Pi! Supports Bluetooth, Airplay and Spotify Connect
Click the blue button, it will re-direct you to balenaCloud, choose your existing, already created Fleet, and a new build will start. Let it finish, any updates to containers download, and see if it works better.
Second, if that does not work, is to try another SD Card. In that situation, click “Add Device” from your fleet, download the balenaOS image and flash to a fresh SD Card, then boot that up in your Raspberry Pi. Once it boots up (it will take a few minutes), you will see a new, second device in your Dashboard. It will then download the containers, which will take some time, and eventually start running the containers and balenaSound application.
If neither of those work, then we can begin investigating log files, verify the Bluetooth is functional on your Pi by testing with Raspbian, and try a few other things…but these steps I outlined are the quickest, easiest ways to being troubleshooting. Thanks!
Hi dtischler,
First, thank you very much for your suggestions - I will try them out now and come back and report.
Very best regards. Branko
Hi dtischler,
The first experiment resulted in the same not-working situation as before.
Second experiment resulted in some progress, but not to satisfaction 
Dashboard showing all services running (except Host excited).
Log is showing some errors and warnings
multiroom client is reporting ‘broken pipe’
audio complains unsupported socket, about latency,
I can see balena OS as Bluetooth on two notebooks and Android phone, but not on Amazon Firestick, which is bad, because I want to use RPi and belena OS primarily for connecting Firestick to Hi-Fi.
I can pair, connect notebooks (when disconnecting one notebook reports driver error) and Android phone and it seems all three are playing audio to RPi balena OS BT (because sound is switched to BT output, and on second notebook I can set volume for balena OS. BUT… no sound is coming out of audio jack of RPi (although I know cable and jack are functioning with other devices). Important here is that if I use HDMI, saund is broadcasted - so it seems balena OS is not utilising audio jack output on RPI.
When listening to audio output from balena OS RPi over HDMI, there is big latency (making usage impossible).
To summarise remaining issues:
- balena OS is not showing up as BT device in Amazon Firestick, although I can see and use other BT devices there
- how to enable belena OS output over audio jack of RPi
- how to overcome latency when using HDMI audio output
Ok, so, there is some progress on this then @Branko_Znuderl … maybe not ideal yet, but seems to be a good start!
A few more items to consider here:
-
Switching SD Cards seems to have fixed the basic underlying issue. You now have gotten the application installed and containers running. Unfortunately, SD Cards are very finicky and can be unreliable, so I am not surprised by this, and is why I recommended it right away.
-
You can control which audio output is used. The default is HDMI, as you found out. To switch to Aux, you can set a Variable in the dashboard, as documented here: Customization - Home. The one you want is AUDIO_OUTPUT, and set it to RPI_HEADPHONES. That documentation is definitely worth a read, there is a lot of good info there.
-
Some of the containers may exit, or show errors, when features are not in use (such as Multi Room in this case). This is normal and totally fine. If you are only using one device, you can actually set a variable for SOUND_MODE to STANDALONE to turn off MultiRoom and increase performance a bit.
-
If other devices can identify the balenaSound device, and play audio, then that tells me the application is fully functional…and as I do not have a Firestick, I can’t quite say why only that device can’t identify or stream to balenaSound. I am a bit at a loss and that specific item. 
Hope that helps!
I’m experiencing the same issue: BalenaOS shows up as a bluetooth device on my iPhone and can be paired successfully but does not show up as a bluetooth device on my FireTV Stick 4K. Pairing my headphones with the FireTV Stick 4K works without any problem: Is Balena OS maybe using a device type the FireTV Stick does not recognize as an audio device?