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Bluetooth just absolutely refuses to connect to any audio sinks. I've tried with two separate speakers that I can pair with just fine on iOS, yet when I try, I get this error in blueman:

Connection Failed: DBusFailedError: Protocol not available...

It doesn't even show up in pulseaudio (probably because I can't connect).

I've googled and come across tons of "solutions" that never work. I've honestly tried so many, I forget what I've even tried.

This is important to me because I set up Ubuntu for the purpose of having a HTPC, yet it's lacking functionality to connect with Bluetooth speakers. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

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  • I just want to share my experience with bluetooth problems under Linux Mint 17.2, 17.3 and 18. Problem was my card (Broadcom BCM4352) and bcmwl-kernel-source driver which didn't work very well. I spent hours of trying to get BT running. Wifi also has connection aborts from time to time. So I bought INTEL AC8260 combo card and everything works like a charm. "pactl load-module module-bluetooth-policy" and "pactl load-module module-bluetooth-discover" worked for me now. Thanks!
    – breakpoint
    Aug 9, 2016 at 16:59
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    [sic] is usually meant to indicate an error reproduced as-is. But "sink" is the correct term here, not an error. A bluetooth audio "sink" is something that receives bluetooth audio. This is bluetooth standard terminology, and it distinguishes the device that receives bluetooth audio from the device that sends it.
    – thomasrutter
    Jan 18, 2017 at 3:37

3 Answers 3

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In my case, this was solved by using these two commands: 

pactl load-module module-bluetooth-policy 
pactl load-module module-bluetooth-discover
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  • Your first command gave me "Failure: Module initialization failed", but the second command made it possible for me to connect to my BT headphones as 'audio sink'; formerly they would only connect as 'headset service', which wasn't any use to me.
    – Ruud Helderman
    Feb 18, 2018 at 19:49
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Might want to check you have pulseaudio-module-bluetooth installed. I was having trouble until I found this post on GitHub Not saying this is an answer to this specific problem but just to make sure.

sudo apt-get install pulseaudio-bluetooth
killall pulseaudio
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  • command here was: sudo apt install pulseaudio-module-bluetooth
    – nmz787
    Feb 21, 2019 at 8:00
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Try this:

sudo /etc/init.d/bluetooth restart

pulseaudio -k

pulseaudio --start

Then go to the audio manager, and make sure the program that's generating audio has the Bluetooth "sink" as output.

Reference link - https://github.com/blueman-project/blueman/issues/304

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  • 4
    Doesn't fix it, nor do I see how it would. The problem isn't with PulseAudio, it's with Bluetooth. It says, after I've gone through "Add new device," that it was "Added successfully but failed to connect."
    – tayoung
    May 7, 2016 at 0:51

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