Bluetooth microphone not released after call ended

hal-shortie

Connect bluetooth headphones with microphone to computer
Open Google Meet in Orion
Configure Google Meet to use headphones as input and output
Start a Google Meet
Leave Google Meet & Close Tab

Usually when you use a bluetooth headset and both the microphone & audio from the microphone you can hear that the audio quality is reduced after (4) and then improves again after (5) (due to bluetooth bandwidth restrictions).

You can easily verify this by letting some music play throughout all the steps and hearing the quality drop.

On any other browser, after (5), the quality increases again (e.g. Firefox, Safari, Chrome), however on Orion the quality stays low. The only way to fix this seems to be to quit Orion entirely.

I wish I could provide screenshots or videos, but impossible due to audio only issues.

macOS 14.5 -- Orion Version 0.99.128.2.1-beta (WebKit 619.1.11.111.2)

Sonoma (14)

Vlad

hal-shortie I am not able to reproduce this, will leave open for others. Not clear if Orion or system specific atm.

hal-shortie

Hm, I wonder whether it's an Airpods thing in that case? I am using AirPods Max. Will keep my eyes open to see if I can reproduce this under some but not other circumstances.

Vlad

hal-shortie Using Airpods Pro 2 and no issue.

bitwalker

@Vlad Are there any debugging tools we can use to troubleshoot issues related to audio/bluetooth devices? I'd like to do some digging and try to figure out some of the issues related to AirPods and Google Meet, but AFAICT there isn't much we can do on our end to gather the necessary info for that part of Orion.

I looked at the debug info you can ask Orion for, but it doesn't include any of the devices Orion knows about (e.g. when selecting input/output devices in Google Meet for example). Maybe it doesn't keep track of that, and just gathers it on the fly, but if you have any suggestions or ways I can do the legwork necessary to pin down the root cause, I'd love to help! Not sure how practical attaching a debugger like lldb is for something as complex as Orion, but if something like that is a viable option, I'll definitely give it a shot and see what I can find.

I have Google Meet meetings on a very regular basis, so I'm hitting some of these bugs frequently, so I have plenty of opportunities to try out any potential solutions!

Vlad

bitwalker I use Google meet and Airpods and do not encounter the issue and because there are not a lot of upvotes here I tend to think it is localised to your setup. Debugging that - really have no idea where to start our hands are full of all other stuff we are doing.

hal-shortie

Is it possible this is related to profiles somehow?

I just realized I can remove this "lock" or whatever it is by just quitting the profile I used google meet in, while the other profile is still running. Simply closing all the windows in the profile however seems to be insufficient.

Vlad

hal-shortie We'd love to have reproducible steps, it would accelerate finding what the issue is.