/pulseaudio

PulseAudio PPA for Ubuntu 20.04 that incorporates mSBC/WBS and fixes low volume on some BT headsets

PulseAudio PPA for Ubuntu 20.04

This PPA contains PulseAudio packages, incorporating mSBC/WBS and fixes low volume on some Bluetooth headsets.

The following merge requests are included on top of the 14.2 release, along with their merge dates for easy reference:

Some of these patches are technically not required, but were included to avoid needing to resolve complicated merge conflicts.

This PPA also includes GStreamer packages with the following patches to enable support for LDAC, aptX and aptX-HD codecs:

Why?

I was having trouble with my Grado GW100, where the microphone volume was too low for the other party.

An alternate solution was to replace PulseAudio with PipeWire entirely, but the official PipeWire package in Ubuntu 20.04 LTS is too old and I didn't want to go through the hassle of packaging a recent release.

Installation

Important Note: This may require a recent kernel (I use 5.12.5) for mSBC to work properly. See the comments in this linked issue.

To add this PPA to your system, run the following:

curl -s --compressed "https://yjwong.github.io/pulseaudio/key.gpg" | sudo apt-key add -
sudo curl -s --compressed -o /etc/apt/sources.list.d/pulseaudio.list "https://yjwong.github.io/pulseaudio/pulseaudio.list"
sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade

After installation, you will also need to restart PulseAudio for the changes to take effect:

systemctl --user daemon-reload
systemctl --user restart pulseaudio

Building

Ensure you have the requisite build dependencies installed on your system.

Then, check out the packaged/14.2.99 branch, then run:

git archive --format=tar.gz -o ../pulseaudio_14.2.99.orig.tar.gz --prefix=pulseaudio-14.2.99/ upstream/14.2.99
dpkg-buildpackage -uc -us

Built packages will be found in the parent directory.

References