Bluetooth audio bug??

KingSmed · April 9, 2021

My VCS has been idle for a few weeks while I gathered the parts for an upgrade, which I did a couple days ago. RAM is now 16GB, and put in a 500GB M.2 drive. Powered it on to see a big pile of updates being processed.

Truth be told, I had been doing precious little with my VCS before deciding to start buying parts. So I decided to try the Guntech demo. My system is connected to a monitor that has no audio, so I paired up an external bluetooth amp (Monoprice IIIP) for the sound. A few minutes into the game, the audio just quit. After a few more minutes, it came back. This went on for about 15 minutes, then I had to step away. When I came back, I was working on a few other things on my laptop so I decided to stream some YouTube videos on the VCS. I soon noticed the same trouble (audio cutting in and out) was happening here as well - it wasn't just the game. Did a cold reboot, no change. I soon noticed that often times, the audio cutting out would happen at the same time as the system fan spinning up - but not every time. I also found that if I paused the video when the sound stopped, I would later know that the sound had come back on because about a half second of audio from the moment it stopped would be played back. I experimented a bit with this, and it was clear the audio came from the moment the sound had dropped, and NOT from the moment when I hit pause. This makes me think the audio issue is in the VCS and not the amp, but to be fair I don't know anough about bluetooth audio to be sure.

Has anyone else experienced this? If so, was it happening before the recent OS updates?

Edited April 9, 2021 by KingSmed
clarity

justclaws · April 9, 2021

Well, I've never heard of this problem before, but I guess very few people use only Bluetooth audio.
The few people I saw who were using Bluetooth audio with speakers or headphones had no problems
at the time, but it's worth reporting to Atari, for sure.
As AtariOS is Linux based, and Linux audio with Bluetooth is not a new thing, it's suprising, of course.
I can for sure test it myself, but not tonight as right now it's midnight here.
I'd be trying a different Bluetooth audio device, and see if I get the same issues - like headphones?

KingSmed · April 11, 2021

My apologies, I failed to do proper troubleshooting in my first post. As I was thinking back on that day, I realized I had NOT done a cold reboot, but a warm one. Realizing my error, I tried again, and sure enough the issue has gone away. Probably a transient RAM corruption issue, and I am very embarrassed.