Raspberry Pi 400 Audio Issue Solved

Somehow, I expected the problem to be solved before the great XMAS sales. Well, in this case, it was just before, or in the country I live, too late.

I am posting this message on December 5, also known as Sinterklaas day. In The Netherlands, this is when kids get their gifts. Heiligabend (Dec.24) or Boxing day, don't mean anything over here in the Low Lands. So, what I am writing about was probably too late for the Dutch market.

Anyway, the Raspberry Pi Foundation published a new version of Raspberry Pi OS, in which they replaced ALSA with PulseAudio. PulseAudio works directly with Bluetooth, solving all the problems I complained about before.

On part, the complaining might have been on my own laziness too. I wrote about installing PulseAudio and that it would be working so so. In particular volume control from the desktop would not work. More on that later.

So, I did the typical apt update and apt full-upgrade. Indeed, now PulseAudio is running.

Without further thinking, I tried to use, just as a newby, the speaker icon in the panel to control the audio volume, without any luck. However, this is me, using a customize panel, so everything is locked in place from the previous of the OS. At closer inspection, the panel item I was using was still ALSA.

After removing the "Volume Control (ALSA/BT)" panel item and adding the "Volume Control (PulseAudio)" item, the problem was finally solved.

With the audio problem solved, I can highly recommend the Raspberry Pi 400 as a desktop PC replacement for non-gaming use.

By now, not only have a written some texts and programs on the RPi400, I also designed (CAD) a few parts and prepared (slize) those for 3D-printing, all with just the RPi400.

Not having used the GPIO yet, I can report the Arduino working perfectly with a RPi400. More on this in posts to come.

Connecting JBL Flip 4 Speaker to a Chromebook

If you follow my other blog, you might know that I lately obtained a pair of JBL Flip 4 speakers. There were a few drivers behind that decision, first of all the sublime sound quality and secondly that a pair can form a stereo pair. While that was all find with my phone, my Chromebooks, while connecting, had troubles accepting the devices as audio sinks.

For convenience, I gave those things names, as this is possible in the JBL Connect App on Android. Maybe that was the cause of all troubles, I don't know.
The speakers, while working fine, refused to present the settings option on the JBL Connect App at some stage. Also, it turned out to be a hit and miss game when connecting the speakers up into a stereo pair.

So, I decided to reset the speakers to factory setting. This is done by pressing the "+" and "play" bottom, while the speaker is powered on, until the speaker powers off.
Of course, this removed my fancy naming scheme. Well, so be it!

As a result, the speakers are now recognized by my Chromebooks.
So, If you have trouble connecting your JBL speaker to a Chromebook, you might want to try to reset your speaker to factory settings.

As a side remark, you will still need your phone to setup stereo mode. Once that is done, you can connect with the Chromebook and enjoy a clean and neat stereo stage setup by really small Bluetooth speakers.