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.

One thing has been holding me back from buying Bluetooth headphones: my Linux laptop doesn’t support Bluetooth APTX. Later Sony open-sourced LDAC, but those open-source devs are still too busy arguing about whether the code is “orthodox” to actually ship anything. Progress on APTX and LDAC support under Linux has been ongoing — some of it reverse-engineered, some of it code integrations — but none of it got merged upstream, because they’re still bickering. And at this point APTX has already been reverse-engineered, the LDAC source has been released, and it’s even been merged into ALSA, while PulseAudio still hasn’t moved. That makes no sense. So finally someone from China took action. Respect.