Building and Installing pulseaudio-modules-bt from Source

I mentioned before that the third-party module pulseaudio-modules-bt, written by a Chinese developer, can already give Linux APT-X and LDAC support. You can also get the relevant features by updating through the PPA, but that PPA has been a bit overdue lately. The module itself has actually gained a lot of new features since then, including automatic codec selection and the like.

Compiling and installing it isn’t much trouble either. The only catch is that you first need to upgrade your PulseAudio to version 12, which you can do via PPA. Put simply, you can upgrade the module through the PPA first, then compile and overwrite it with the newer build.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:eh5/pulseaudio-a2dp
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libavcodec-dev libldac pulseaudio-module-bluetooth

Then just start compiling:

MODDIR=`pkg-config --variable=modlibexecdir libpulse`
sudo find $MODDIR -regex ".*\(bluez5\|bluetooth\).*\.so" -exec cp {} {}.bak \;
git clone https://github.com/EHfive/pulseaudio-modules-bt.git
cd pulseaudio-modules-bt
git submodule update --init
git -C pa/ checkout v`pkg-config libpulse --modversion|sed 's/[^0-9.]*\([0-9.]*\).*/\1/'`
mkdir build && cd build
cmake ..
make
sudo make install

Finally, don’t forget to make this change — that’s what fully turns on the codec switching.