~ Connecting two Bluetooth headsets to your Linux system: audio routing in PipeWire

Imagine you want to stream a movie at home but also want to keep things quiet to avoid disturbing others. Evidently, this what headsets were invented for. Connecting one wireless Bluetooth headset is typically straightforward - aside from the occasional Bluetooth pairing issues. But what if you want to watch that movie with someone else, and you both want to use headsets? Connecting two Bluetooth headsets, or even combining wired and wireless headsets to share the same audio, isn’t as simple as it sounds. This blog post shows how to achieve this on modern Linux distributions.

Fig: Connecting an audio source - Spotify - to multiple output devices by using audio routing with PipeWire and `qpwgraph`.

During the last years, several Linux distributions have started to support the PipeWire audio server. It is even the default audio server in Debian 12 and Ubuntu 22.10. With PipeWire, managing audio devices has become much easier. PipeWire enables flexible audio setups and supports audio routing: sending out audio from a single source to several output devices. This is exactly what we need to stream audio to multiple headsets.

If you use PipeWire on your system, qpwgraph provides an intuitive graphical interface that lets you visualize and control audio routing. To connect multiple headsets:

1. First install qpwgraph e.g via apt install qpwgraph
2. Startup qpwgraph which should show your current audio routing graph.
3. Pair your Bluetooth headsets to your machine. They will appear in the audio routing graph once paired successfully.
4. Connect the audio source to your headsets by connecting ‘wires’ from your media player to the headsets.

I was surprised how robust audio has become on Linux and how easy and user friendly it is to set up even more complex audio / MIDI configurations. Give it a try!

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