Bluetooth audio stopped working after 26.05 upgrade

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1

Has bluetooth audio stopped working for anyone else after 26.05?

My config is simple, the relevant part being

services.pipewire = { enable = true; pulse.enable = true; };
hardware.bluetooth.enable = true;

On 25.11, I could connect to bluetooth speakers and use them to output audio, eg choosing with pwvucontrol.

Since 26.05, I can make the bluetooth connection (using bluetoothctl) but then the speaker is not available as an audio sink, eg checking wpctl status, I see the bluez5 audio device listed but it doesn’t have a corresponding sink,

$ wpctl status
...
Audio
 ├─ Devices:
 │      48. Built-in Audio                      [alsa]
 │      75. Q M20 HD White                      [bluez5]
 │  
 ├─ Sinks:
 │  *   52. Built-in Audio Analog Stereo        [vol: 0.40]
 │  
...
2

This happened to me too! I daily drive two NixOS instances, and my bluetooth audio failed on both.

I tried debugging it on my end, and after inspecting a few bluetooth and audio related services, the following seemed the most important log:

bluetoothd[53864]: src/service.c:btd_service_connect() a2dp-source profile connect failed for 78:2B:64:36:2B:EC: Protocol not available

This is still happening right now on one of my machines (nixos-version > 26.11.20260626.e73de5b (Zokor); however, the problem has already been solved on the other one. I’ll come back to this thread with more information!

Thanks for posting! I knew something was up, but could not find any discussion on it.

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3

My other machine is currently working, and my nixos-version is also 26.11.20260626.e73de5b; so I suppose that is not the issue. I’ll keep an eye on this thread. I have been a bit busy these days and my configuration is not uniform across the two machines, so maybe it can be a help in figuring out what exactly is happening.

1 Like
4

I am on 26.05.20260630.95ca1e2 (Yarara) and seeing the following error from bluetooth.service,

bluetoothd[1868]: src/service.c:btd_service_connect() a2dp-sink profile connect failed for 7C:96:D2:F2:15:FB: Device or resource busy