bluealsa

Bluetooth always causes me misery and suffering.  I came across a wonderful utility by Arkadiusz Bokowy called bluealsa some time ago but I haven't previously successfully integrated it into my MPD music solution.  It has been over two weeks since my last post and this is mainly due to renewed struggles with bluetooth.

I found that bluealsa is in the raspbian repository so I could install with "apt install bluealsa".  Sometimes it would work fine for many hours.  It would stop working and I would be unable to find its address or connect back to the Jongo without rebooting.
I noticed that "dmesg" was giving frequent "under-voltage detected" messages and I think this corresponded to my disappearing devices.  Clearly my home power socket USB supplies aren't meaty enough for an RPI 3 so I changed to a better one.
I still wasn't able to get a good connection so eventually I despaired and installed pulseaudio.  It has its own eccentricities and I wasn't happy overall so I tried again with bluealsa.

Initially I guessed at how to configure it, and since my knowledge of building applications is extremely limited, this didn't go well.  By the time I found that comprehensive installation instructions are provided in the wiki I had done bad things to to my new server and stopped bluetooth working at all.  I spent a couple of days recreating PI32 (which was a good test that my written notes were comprehensive) and then installed bluealsa properly.

With a proper installation bluealsa appears to do its job very well.  I have a Pure Jongo bluetooth speaker A2 called JOB connected to my hifi.  I start bluealsa at boot time.  As soon as I connect the bluetooth speaker with bluetoothctl it is available to use.  I can use JOB from aplay, mpg123 or mpd and it acts just like a speaker attached to the RPI alsa jack socket.