Bluetooth sound quality drops when running playdate simulator on macos

SDK Bug Reports
1

i'm running macos 13.3.1 and playdate sdk 1.13.5.

when listening to audio on my system via bluetooth i can hear a substantial drop in quality as soon as i open the playdate simulator.

looking at the console in macos, i see the audio codec before launching reading out:
BTLQ set Link Quality Data codec to 33023

but then immediately changes to this upon opening the simulator:
Setting SCO audio codec to AAC-ELD at sample rate of 24000 for device

quitting the simulator immediately causes this readout in the console and returns normal good quality to the sound:
Clearing UL voice data err:0, length to codec:58, maxPacketSize:0, data.getSize():60, seq 205, length in payload 58
BTLQ set Link Quality Data codec to 33023

i'm not totally sure what all that means or why it would happen, but it sounds the same as when you're on a call and the audio changes, presumably to allow mic/audio data and lower latency or something.

this could be an macos issue, but i've only experienced this with the simulator so i thought it'd be worth posting.

1 Like
2

Interesting find. are you on Apple or Intel chip?

3

I think it’s a MacOS/bluetooth limitation because I’ve also seen the iOS simulator trigger it, but there’s a workaround which is to set the input to something other than the bluetooth device.

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4

oh nice! that fixes it. i was also able to close the simulator and reopen it without it switching the mic input again. i'm not sure how it got stuck into that situation, but it persisted through a computer restart.

5

just noting here that every time i reconnect a bluetooth audio device, like my headphones while the playdate simulator is running, the mic input gets reengaged for the headphones and you must manually change it. it's not an enormous deal, but it's still annoying and should be looked into as it doesn't happen with the previous version of the sdk.

i'm on apple silicon btw.