Well I now have BT working in A2DP mode. Hopefully it will stay working. There was never any problem pairing or connecting, just no sound would come out and the sound settings screen did not offer any choices.
So, once paired and "pulseaudio -k" issued (but I don't know if that is needed or not):
In the Sound Settings window, the headset is visible but does not offer any options to choose a profile.
In bluetooth settings, pairing is shown but not profiles
However, found by accident, right-clicking on the entry in the Blueman screen offers the option to select an audio profile. This was set to 'none' by default (why I cannot imagine). Setting it to High Fidelity fixed the problem immediately.
Why have default settings that cannot produce the output that every user is going to need? Weird. And why have both sound settings and bluetooth settings screens, and yet the crucial function is on a blueman screen that does not come up when looking at the settings? Bluetooth settings and blueman should be merged.
There still remains the problem that the sound settings screen does not allow the profile to be selected, though it did in 12.04.
The other problem of course is that there are no definitive and reliable user functional instructions for this (or indeed most of Ubuntu) and major searching of individual users problems and attempted fixes is needed to find clues. 14.04 is an LTS release and all this stuff should 'just work'. Using Ubuntu is more like a research project than using a working system.
I appreciate that lots of people give up their effort to develop Ubuntu and other distros, and that is appreciated. But things that work (as all this did in 12.04) should not be tinkered with until they then fail.
Well I now have BT working in A2DP mode. Hopefully it will stay working. There was never any problem pairing or connecting, just no sound would come out and the sound settings screen did not offer any choices.
So, once paired and "pulseaudio -k" issued (but I don't know if that is needed or not):
In the Sound Settings window, the headset is visible but does not offer any options to choose a profile.
In bluetooth settings, pairing is shown but not profiles
However, found by accident, right-clicking on the entry in the Blueman screen offers the option to select an audio profile. This was set to 'none' by default (why I cannot imagine). Setting it to High Fidelity fixed the problem immediately.
Why have default settings that cannot produce the output that every user is going to need? Weird. And why have both sound settings and bluetooth settings screens, and yet the crucial function is on a blueman screen that does not come up when looking at the settings? Bluetooth settings and blueman should be merged.
There still remains the problem that the sound settings screen does not allow the profile to be selected, though it did in 12.04.
The other problem of course is that there are no definitive and reliable user functional instructions for this (or indeed most of Ubuntu) and major searching of individual users problems and attempted fixes is needed to find clues. 14.04 is an LTS release and all this stuff should 'just work'. Using Ubuntu is more like a research project than using a working system.
I appreciate that lots of people give up their effort to develop Ubuntu and other distros, and that is appreciated. But things that work (as all this did in 12.04) should not be tinkered with until they then fail.
Now I feel better.