The Butt Ugly Weblog

Bluetooth audio problems with 10.8

Upgrade my Macbook Pro to OSX 10.8 (aka Mountain Lion) recently. Frankly, it's not much of an upgrade from 10.6, though I like the new login screen. I'm having trouble adjusting to some features, like the disappearing scroll bars (mostly because the horizontal scroll bar always appears on top of the item I actually want to click, causing endless confusion and minor enragement).

I also think Finder was better in 10.6, mostly because I used the "latest changed files" feature heavily and it seems gone in 10.8... Oh well. Also, for someone who makes a living writing Java code, the hassle of getting everything reinstalled is a pain.

The good thing however (and the major reason why I wanted to upgrade) is that the Bluetooth stack seems a lot more stable than it was in 10.6. It hasn't caused a major freeze even once so far, and unlike the old one, it no longer wants to put my BH-905i headphones into headset mode, but accepts that A2DP is what I mostly want from my headphones, not the crappy headset profile...

However, I did have some issues with the sound quality: terrible popping noise; not loud enough to make sound unbearable, but just enough to annoy me all the time. So after some googling I found a magical command line setting you can use:

defaults write com.apple.BluetoothAudioAgent "Apple Bitpool Min (editable)" 53

Restart music player and Bluetooth (turn it off and on again) and you should be set.