I asked this question before, but got no answer, this is still an issue as of release 23.04.
I just noted something whilst troubleshooting bluetooth audio on Ubuntu 22.10 on pulseaudio, that restarting pulseaudio is not equivalent to a reboot of the system and that a manual restart of pulseaudio prevents bluetooth audio connections from being recognised. I had not seen this before when troubleshooting audio and I wanted to bring it to the attention of someone with a bit more experience than I do in case it has any bearing on the os.
When I restart pulseaudio using
systemctl --user restart pulseaudio.service
I can no longer get pulseaudio to recognise my bluetooth headset.
Although I am capable of connecting to the device flawlessly with bluetooth, pulseaudio does not see it, even when I also restart alsa.
sudo alsa force-reload
I am not as familiar with pulseaudio as others are in this community, but I think it might have something to do with loading the a2dp module
sudo pactl load-module module-bluetooth-discover
When trying to run this command following a restart of pulseaudio using the above I get a somewhat common error, module initialisation failed. I have not followed the advice in this as my bluetooth generally works with each bootup and can generally be fixed otherwise after disconnecting and reconnecting the device once or twice. If I restart pulseaudio even once however, I am not able to get bluetooth audio working at all.
I have checked this possible solution here but it did not work.
I have had several issues with bluetooth audio on Ubuntu. It may be commonplace though as it has been recurring for me throughout several installations from Ubuntu 22.04 onwards. It would have been incredibly helpful to know that manually restarting pulseaudio for bluetooth audio troubleshooting was pointless (at least in my case) and led me to make further unnecessary changes in pursuit of fixing the problems I was having such as swapping over to pipewire, even though as other users have pointed out to me, bluetooth codecs are better supported through pulseaudio...
Hopefully this will help another new user struggling with their own bluetooth audio issues get to a resolution in a more timely manner than I, or help narrow down why this might be, and perhaps find a fix so that audio troubleshooting of pulseaudio does not require a full reboot.
