Fail to connect to bluetooth headset on ubuntu 16.04

Solution 1:

So after some digging, I have found that there were problems with pulseaudio and bluez.. something to do with the protocols which were delegated to gstreamer but I can't seem to find the post where I read this. something must have broken with the latest update, because I had my bluetooth working fine the day before

Anyway.. what solved this for me was purging pulseaudio and reinstalling it. as per this post:

$ sudo apt-get purge pulseaudio
$ sudo apt-get clean && sudo apt-get autoremove
$ sudo apt-get install pulseaudio*
$ sudo alsa force-reload
$ pavucontrol

And reboot.

I had tried purging and reinstalling only pulseaudio bluetooth module. But that had not solved the issue for me. So in the step where I installed pulseaudio, note I installed pulseaudio*. This installs all pulseaudio modules, including bluetooth. You don't actually need to run pavucontrol, as you may need to install it. All it does for us here, effectively, is restart pulseaudio. I decided to install it because it has more utilities and setting options for pulseaudio.

The post suggests some more tweaking. but pairing/connection problems were solved for me after the reboot, so I never got to that.

A previous issue I had with pulseaudio presented itself right after I reinstalled it, where a2dp would not be recognised. If it happens to you, check this post for a fix.

Everything is working as expected now.