Notes on getting audio out of my FreeBSD 13.0-CURRENT laptop over bluetooth to a speaker.

bluetooth_speaker_freebsd13.md

Bluetooth Audio from a Lenovo X220 running FreeBSD 13.0-CURRENT

2020-04-05

The FreeBSD Handbook Bluetooth chapter is, as usual, great but I needed to do a bit more (or perhaps in a more specific way) to get audio from the Broadcom Bluetooth chip in my Lenovo X220 to the Soundblaster Roar SR20 that lives in my kitchen.

/boot/loader.conf

Load the user character device driver cuse and all the netgraph bluetooth modules, this is better done earlier to avoid the annoying (and possibly significant) WARNING: attempt to domain_add(xyz) after domainfinalize() errors at startup.

cuse_load="YES"
ng_ubt_load="YES"  # for most USB bluetooth, for others, refer to the handbook
ng_hci_load="YES"
ng_l2cap_load="YES"
ng_btsocket_load="YES"
ng_socket_load="YES"
ng_bluetooth_load="YES"

/etc/rc.conf

hcsecd_enable="YES"

Device configuration

Assuming your bluetooth device name is ubt0...

cp /etc/defaults/bluetooth.device.conf /etc/bluetooth/ubt0.conf

In my case I set local_name to the hostname and also set role_switch="NO"

Start the bluetooth stack

service hcsecd start
service bluetooth start ubt0  # if this fails, do it again

Pair with the device for the first time

If you're going to use encryption, set the audio device to pairing mode first.

# bluetooth-config scan
Scanning for new Bluetooth devices (Attempt 1 of 5) ... done.
Found 1 new bluetooth device (now scanning for names):
[ 1] 00:02:3c:xx:xx:xx	"SB ROAR SR20A" (SB_ROAR_SR20A)
Select device to pair with [1, or 0 to rescan]: 1

Writing pairing information description block to /etc/bluetooth/hcsecd.conf.    
(To get PIN, put device in pairing mode first.  )
Enter PIN [nopin]: 0000
Stopping hcsecd.
Waiting for PIDS: 58789.
Starting hcsecd.

bluetooth-config will create an entry in /etc/bluetooth/hosts mapping the bluetooth device's MAC address to a short name. In this case, the shortname for my device is SB_ROAR_SR20A.

Create the virtual OSS device

This step creates the virtual device /dev/dsp, the device /dev/bluetooth/SB_ROAR_SR20A won't actually exist in the dev filesystem so don't go looking for it. Also you can use the shortname defined in /etc/bluetooth/hosts or the full MAC address.

virtual_oss -C 2 -c 2 -r 48000 -b 16 -s 768 -R /dev/null -P /dev/bluetooth/SB_ROAR_SR20A -d dsp

After this on subsequent reboots I only needed to re-run the virtual_oss command to reconnect.