Earlier quoted context omitted.
'It's not Bluetooth's fault, everyone is just using it wrong' does not sound good.
'It's not Bluetooth's fault, Apple is just using it wrong'
And Microsoft. And Google. According to the parent.
Bluetooth remains an 'unusually painful' technology after two decades
51–60 of 599 posts
Re: Bluetooth remains an 'unusually painful' technology after two decades
#52The annoying thing I have with bluetooth, is with my headphones, I connect them up, set them as the sound source and just..... nothing. I have to go round all of my devices and disable the bluetooth on them, because some other device is connected too and although that is not playing any sound at all, somehow has priority and doesn't allow any sound to be played by any other device.
This annoys me to no end, too, but I'd say the issue isn't as much Bluetooth itself as the implementation of multiple sources on the headphones.
I have the exact same issue with a pair of Jabra headphones that have multiple wired inputs. They'll switch between them for frivolous reasons.
Re: Bluetooth remains an 'unusually painful' technology after two decades
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
That sounds more like an Apple Bluetooth stack issue at their OS level rather than something wrong with the Bluetooth chip/tech itself. It's where you should complain to Apple or ask for refunds/replacements. Granted, Apple is not alone here since both Google and Microsoft really botched their Bluetooth stacks on their OSs. Especially Google who hasn't learned you can't treat your C driver/embedded SW like front-end…
Apple have really, really weird BT stack issues.
Legit everyone does. I one time had to convince a VW dealership to read a TSB issued for my 2012 Golf Cheater Edition, bluetooth only played the left channel of audio, but it played on both sides, so you needed music that was different enough on each channel to really notice. Dealership didn't want to believe me until I showed them left/right channel tests on youtube on both android and iphones and told them to use their own phones to test. It took about an hour to flash the repaired firmware on.
Android is on its like 3rd bluetooth stack now? Gabeldorsche, since the meme is rewriting in rust. Every device can support a different number of codecs, everything works on the fallback (or should) but the high definition codecs are a crapshoot.
I remember getting the first gen iphone SE and having a radar open with Apple as all bluetooth audio sounded like it was playing through tin foil speakers, they did fix it but here was the original thread on it: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7521352
Re: Bluetooth remains an 'unusually painful' technology after two decades
#54I tried to learn why BT is still somehow painful to use, and the article basically does not have an answer.
My take from comments here and my experience:
- Makers of BT devices can't agree on many important common things (easy discovery / pairing mode, priority, etc), and have little incentive to seek agreement. It's like phone chargers before USB.
- Makers of BT devices tend to cut corners and/or add not-entirely-standard features. They "save" on writing a good driver. They care little if devices made by their competition don't work reliably or at all in the mix. (And even sometimes their own!)
- RF noise makes radio interfaces like BT inherently not always reliable. But the user never notices when a small EM storm rages nearby, for the user it's just "damn bluetooth glitches for no reason at all".
Re: Bluetooth remains an 'unusually painful' technology after two decades
#55I get far fewer problems if I make sure there's a 1:1 pairing between devices.
Headphones playing from your phone and your mac in a back pack? The mac will wake up every few minutes and steal the connection.
Re: Bluetooth remains an 'unusually painful' technology after two decades
#56Let me pass on to you some ancient Chinese... er, German engineering wisdom:
He who understands wireless communication uses cables.
Re: Bluetooth remains an 'unusually painful' technology after two decades
#57I'm still annoyed that most bluetooth headphones haven't figured out how to provide stereo sound at the same time as using the microphone. There is definitely enough bandwidth in bluetooth 5
That's because there is no profile for that, as per the spec the hands free profile only supports Mono This changes with LE Audio (spec released in March iirc) which is much more channel oriented (e.g. 2 channels stereo playback + 2 more stereo microphone), has a new codec (LC3) and has support in the upcoming android release
Nice, maybe in 15 years I’ll be able to use that in debian.
Re: Bluetooth remains an 'unusually painful' technology after two decades
#58I tried to learn why BT is still somehow painful to use, and the article basically does not have an answer. My take from comments here and my experience: - Makers of BT devices can't agree on many important common things (easy discovery / pairing mode, priority, etc), and have little incentive to seek agreement. It's like phone chargers before USB. - Makers of BT devices tend to cut corners and/or add not-entirely-st…
They do agree on an awful lot of stuff, but the tools provided by the Bluetooth guys aged very poorly (i.e. their tools for generating GATT interfaces as C code is absolute garbage, full of holes and has a built-in buffer overflow capability).
The one thing nobody seems to do is stick to the standards provided, because they simply aren't broad enough for the creative stuff that people do with Bluetooth and Bluetooth LE. Most of us working in this space have some cack-handed way to advertise data without connecting because (for example) most of the connections to Bluetooth LE devices involve you having to do device discovery, even if you are connecting to 500 of the same damn device.
Also, the bluetooth library in Android started out terrible and didn't improve despite being replaced, the Bluetooth chips in most cheap phones are also rubbish and fail when you exceed their undocumented number of connections, often requiring a reboot of the device etc.
In short: You can sheet a lot of the problems back to an ill thought out spec and bluetooth chips in things like phones that just plain suck.
Things like RF interference - I just don't know. Sometimes there is just a heap more bluetooth traffic around than anybody knows about. Packet sniffers are relatively cheap, it's interesting to fire one up in a busy office and see how many bluetooth packet collisions there are (hint: it's a lot). Blame RF storms or whatever but it's more likely to be something advertising a lot and spamming the spectrum.
Re: Bluetooth remains an 'unusually painful' technology after two decades
#59I do find it a frustrating technology. As the article says, pairing can be quite hit and miss. I generally have to search how to pair devices when I have to set it up on a new device, even for devices I've had for years! They're all different, and it can be unreliable. I have read that it suffers the interoperability issues because the spec is complex with many optional bits in it, although I don't know how true that…
Pairing is my main issue with the technology as I’m frequently using one device across multiple devices. The ideal for me would be latency free crystal clear audio that can fuse maybe four different simultaneous input streams, but since that’s likely impossible, I would just like to spend less time in the hell of trying to force my headphones to stop autopairing to the wrong device every time it turns on.
Nobody offers bug free Bluetooth - nobody.
Re: Bluetooth remains an 'unusually painful' technology after two decades
#60People seem to complain a lot about Bluetooth, yet I owned dozens of devices of all vintages and they all played nicely with each other, except for a cheapo pair of MPow earbuds off Amazon. I even managed to transfer old school photos off my ancient 2003 NEC flip phone to my current Android phone even though the former uses Bluetooth 1.1 and the latter 5.1. I also fondly remember using Bluetooth in school to transfer…
I've had pretty good luck with phones and most things (audio has various codec mismatches if you're going for high quality, but that's all at least visible on boxes), but not computers and [nearly anything except HID]. HID works great everywhere, and battery life is amazing , I love bluetooth for HID. Bluetooth headsets and computers seems like a special kind of flaky-hell. I tried ~8 modern high-end headsets on 4 la…
That's weird. I've had pretty much the reverse experience. My Sony and Shure headphones have always worked perfectly (even on Linux!), but I've had issues with a keyboard and mouse not reconnecting after they went to sleep (computer stayed fully on), or at least taking forever.
However, I was surprised by how little lag the mouse had compared to its regular wireless (Logitech unifying).