Anker Soundcore Life Q10 microphone not working

[Luca Andreatta]

I have a ThinkPad E560 with ubuntu 20.04 and I'm trying to use my Soundcore Life Q10 with it, but the microphone doesn't work. I tried also to follow some answers here, but no one worked for me.

I tried to use blueman, but I get Failed to change profile to headset_head_unit. I tried to install oFono, but I cannot compile phonesim due to some problem with dependencies version.

I think that PulseAudio does not support HFP out of the box, and I found many other people that has this problem (see for example https://itectec.com/ubuntu/ubuntu-use-bluetooth-headset-with-microphone-hfp-in-ubuntu-18-04/)

Is there any way to make my headset working?

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

Please try:

Settings >
Sound >
Output >
Configuration = Headset Head Unit (HSP/HFP)

[Luca Andreatta (luca-andreatta)]

Hi Daniel,
no, if I change the profile from A2DP to HSP/HFP nothing changes and the microphone is still not working.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

I have a Soundcore Life Q30 headset and had a similar issue; I also tried going down the ofono route and found it too much of a confusing nightmare.

I ended up using the pulseaudio backport from https://launchpad.net/~smoser/+archive/ubuntu/bluetooth/+packages and also doing a local backport of bluez from impish, as well as adding `autodetect_mtu=yes` to the `load-module module-bluetooth-discover` line in /etc/pulse/default.pa and running `sudo adduser pulse bluetooth`. I haven't tried carefully rolling bits of this back to find out exactly whether all four of those changes are really needed; I'm sure that at least the pulseaudio backport is needed, though, since you definitely need the changes from https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pulseaudio/pulseaudio/-/merge_requests/491.

With this, my headset mostly works for me, although I still sometimes find that pulseaudio crashes when my phone is also connected to the same headset, which results in everything confusingly switching back to the internal speaker/microphone until I figure out what's going on and disconnect my phone. Not ideal - from the crash, I think https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pulseaudio/pulseaudio/-/merge_requests/617 may be related, though I haven't tried backporting that patch yet to see if it helps.

Installing random backports is not for the faint of heart, so a more sensible approach might be to try Ubuntu 21.10 (perhaps from a live USB stick to start with, before committing to the upgrade). Everything I had to backport to get things working was from there, so there's a good chance it will work better.