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Bluetooth remains an 'unusually painful' technology after two decades

cnn.com

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Re: Bluetooth remains an 'unusually painful' technology after two decades

#521

Post by jonny_eh »

patentatt wrote: post #287
CharlesW wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> …since I'm an Apple Music user, whenever I start the car, it just defaults to whatever's I've been listening to there… […] Now why apple just defaults to Apple Music, and not "your music player of choice a.k.a. Spotify" is questionable… As you noted, it continues playing whatever you were playing in whatever app you were using, with no preference for Apple Music (I'm also a Music subscriber). If you were playing so…

Too often I start my car and it begins playing a podcast where I left off. With my kids in the car. I listen to a decent amount of stuff that isn't necessarily appropriate for kids. Makes for a fun scramble to hit that pause button.

And that pause button is never visible by default in CarPlay. Ya gotta hit the menu button in the bottom left a couple times.

Re: Bluetooth remains an 'unusually painful' technology after two decades

#522

Post by amitp »

amichal wrote: post #438

I have 3 BT headphone things. They are all paired to both my mac and my iPhone. Something changed recently. If paired to my mac two out of the three play on hold beeps whenever my Google Meet meeting is muted. Or, and this is really annoying, if my computer happens to transition through some sort of sleep state in the other room. So, if I have them on at night and unless I remembered to disconnect my computer at the…

I had a problem with the combination of Google Meet, my bluetooth headphones (Aftershokz), and Mac OS Monterey. It would keep beeping and putting it on hold. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/disable-automatic-... was the workaround for me, and also in Zoom I disabled "automatically adjust microphone volume". Frustrating.

I have a separate problem where if my computer goes to sleep or goes out of range, the headphones keep beeping until I turn them off. :-/ But this seems specific to the one I'm using and hasn't happened with my others.

Re: Bluetooth remains an 'unusually painful' technology after two decades

#523

Post by lloeki »

NavinF wrote: post #506
lloeki wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sort happens by album artist over here, the first one being Take On Me by a-ha, triggering all sorts of physical pavlovian reactions now. Trigger seems to be iOS thinking it's being helpful so that when I "plug" headphones (either physically, bluetoothically, or carplayly) I presumably want to play music. Also, double click on Library in Music.app nee iTunes on macOS. Plays the whole library, linearly, which, like, w…

> iOS thinking it's being helpful so that when I "plug" headphones (either physically, bluetoothically, or carplayly) I presumably want to play music There’s gotta be something else going on because I’ve never had this happen over the last decade. I’m pretty sure the car is sending a play command to the phone every time it connects.

Except it happens randomly with headsets, whether bluetooth (Bose QC35) or wired (EarPods)

Re: Bluetooth remains an 'unusually painful' technology after two decades

#524

Post by jonny_eh »

conductr wrote: post #490
nobleach wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh my gosh, I didn't know where this was going with the half-naked shaved guys until you said, "Songs of Innocence"... and immediately it became a shared experience. If I could somehow tell my phone, "NEVER play Apple Music, always defer to Spotify if you have to auto-play anything", I'd do it in a heartbeat.

This is the real issue. Apple Music being a firm default. The U2 thing can be deleted from Apple Music. It exists because it was released that way a decade or so ago. It got pushed into everyone’s playlist as a purchased album, but can be deleted. I have no music at all in Apple Music for this reason. I prefer silence over this. My problem is that I have to turn off BT on my phone for various reasons. Yet, no matter…

You can delete Apple Music from your phone, but that can break BT Audio playback on some devices.

Re: Bluetooth remains an 'unusually painful' technology after two decades

#525

Post by smoldesu »

stonemetal12 wrote: post #512
smoldesu wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bluetooth experiences will be largely software-dependent. Comparing Airpods on a Macbook to a Windows laptop and some Sony earbuds? It's no contest, Airpods will win every time. If we're, say, testing the Airpods on Windows and the Sony buds on Linux (where they have LDAC support), the tables will be completely turned. All of these headphones are context-sensitive, and will behave differently on different hardware. Y…

Isn't all that it just works software "driver quality"? If we were talking about a graphics card that couldn't detect monitor resolution and keep connected, we wouldn't give the card a pass just because it is a driver issue.

I mean, there are plenty of perfectly functional graphics cards that are given a pass because their drivers don't work with Wayland or refuse to implement resizable BAR. These are pretty solidly driver issues (ones that have persisted over decades, at that), and nobody really ever brings it up because it's not necessarily Nvidia's responsibility to address it.

The larger factor (in my eyes) is implementation. Bluetooth quality is all over the place: mobile Bluetooth stacks used to be abysmal until ~5 years ago, and desktop OSes still don't have it ironed out yet. It makes perfect sense that reviewers would focus on the hardware, as opposed to enumerating how each device works on each operating system, and so on.

Re: Bluetooth remains an 'unusually painful' technology after two decades

#526

Post by cryptonector »

blackhaz wrote: post #91

My car (Lexus) and my iPhone X: The car detects iPhone presence, like, 50% of the time. If it does detect it, it shows me a couple of half-naked shaved guys hugging each other and begins playing "Songs of Innocence" the moment I turn the ignition on. I tried deleting this song from the iPhone, but it auto-magically restores itself somehow, as if it is in the telephone's firmware. The image of men hugging in shade is…

Nowadays you can delete (really, hide), the U2 album. If you delete all remaining music in iTunes, then the U2 album gets restored, and you have to re-delete it.

Other problems:

  - the darned thing is eager to connect
  
    My wife gets in the car to go somewhere,
    turns it on, my phone connects, and I lose
    audio / she steals my audio.
  
  - the darned thing connects even if the car's
    audio is off
  
    get in, use a maps app, can't hear anything,
    ohhh, right!
  
  - carplay uses wifi, iphone fails to route
    properly
  
    can't use carplay
  
  - anyways, carplay is super sensitive to EM
    noise
  
    be me, be driving w/ navigation on, go through
    high-traffic, EM noisy area, lose navigation
    -- distracting!  dangerous!
Solution:

  - refuse to connect to the car's wifi
  
  - that means no carplay
  
  - that means no distractions
  
  - delete the U2 album
  
  - delete it harder
  
  - turn off bluetooth every morning
  
  - that means no more stolen audio when
    someone drives the family cars
> but what I know is that I really fucking hate U2.

I can't imagine not hating U2.

Re: Bluetooth remains an 'unusually painful' technology after two decades

#527

Post by vbezhenar »

InitialLastName wrote: post #294
vbezhenar wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess you're right. My bluetooth experience is Macbook, iPhone, Apple keyboard, Apple mouse and Apple headphones. Everything works extremely well. The thing that I like most is power indicator integrated with iOS and macOS. Allows me to charge those things before they run out of power. As long as you stay in the garden, things are smooth.

That's just... the BLE battery level service? AFAICT Windows does the same thing when you connect a BLE device that reports a battery.

I have no idea, I've read reviews from some bluetooth mouse and reviewer mentioned that macOS does not display its battery level. I thought that it's proprietary.

Re: Bluetooth remains an 'unusually painful' technology after two decades

#528

Post by cryptonector »

blackhaz wrote: post #91

My car (Lexus) and my iPhone X: The car detects iPhone presence, like, 50% of the time. If it does detect it, it shows me a couple of half-naked shaved guys hugging each other and begins playing "Songs of Innocence" the moment I turn the ignition on. I tried deleting this song from the iPhone, but it auto-magically restores itself somehow, as if it is in the telephone's firmware. The image of men hugging in shade is…

> but what I know is that I really fucking hate U2.

I bet your comment has hundreds of upvotes already.

Re: Bluetooth remains an 'unusually painful' technology after two decades

#529

Post by conductr »

jonny_eh wrote: post #524
conductr wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the real issue. Apple Music being a firm default. The U2 thing can be deleted from Apple Music. It exists because it was released that way a decade or so ago. It got pushed into everyone’s playlist as a purchased album, but can be deleted. I have no music at all in Apple Music for this reason. I prefer silence over this. My problem is that I have to turn off BT on my phone for various reasons. Yet, no matter…

You can delete Apple Music from your phone, but that can break BT Audio playback on some devices.

Nice, thanks! I'm going to try that. I feel like I tried once and it used to be undeletable; probably long time ago.

Re: Bluetooth remains an 'unusually painful' technology after two decades

#530

Post by hbn »

cptcobalt wrote: post #366
mcculley wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a Mercedes lease for three years with the same problem of automatically playing the first song as sorted alphabetically. In my case, it was "A Boy Named Sue" by Johnny Cash. That song loses its humor after you hear it a few hundred times.

Same thing with my husband's car, his phone, and the song "A-Punk" by Vampire Weekend. I now jokingly play it as the first song any time we head off on a long road trip, much to his immense frustration.

My car's song of choice is About a Girl (Live Acoustic) from Nirvana's MTV Unplugged in New York live album
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