Troubleshooting technical issues is much easier when both the user and support agent practice clear communication. For this reason, we have provided the template below for you to fill out with information about your issue. Please provide as much detail as possible so we can most efficiently resolve your problem.
Delete the any text above the line separator below before posting
Description of the issue:
Bluetooth headphones work perfectly under every scenario EXCEPT if the audio or video is accessed with the Brave browser. How can this issue be reproduced?
Connect bluetooth headphones and test them in the sound settings.
Open any browser other than Brave and navigate to youtube or anywhere else (i.e.) pandora. And enjoy your sound coming over your bluetooth headphones.
Open Brave and go to the same site you were just listening to so raptly. You will immediately notice that the sound is coming out of your system speakers instead of your headphones.
Go to the sound settings. You will see that the sound is still set to play from your bluetooth headset.
Test the headset speakers from the sound settings, and it will play the sounds over your left and right ear just as it is supposed to.
HOWEVER, if you are on Zorin (or Ubuntu probably) you will also see just above Output – in the volume section – that you now have a new volume slider for Brave (in addition to the System Sounds slider that was always there). In fact, if you try to play a second video from the same page, you’ll get a second Brave audio slider.
Slide that Brave slider all the way down to zero and go back to your the page with your sound source and play it again. Now you don’t even have any sound coming out of your system speakers! If you have two Brave audio sliders you can really experiment! But as soon as you navigate away from the page with the source videos, those Brave sliders disappear. Expected result:
I expect some Nerd to come on here and say this cannot happen because Brave has no impact or effect on the system settings. I’m NOT supposed to believe my lying ears and eyes.
But what I would LIKE is for Brave developers to fix the problem. It comes up on numerous platforms. And simply closing a discussion after not solving it for 30 days is NOT a solution. It’s just a dismissal of the problem all these prior folks have brought attention to.
Brave Version( check About Brave):
1.76.82 Additional Information:
Brave is my first-choice browser everywhere.
To make such an assertion you would have to find the X11/Wayland API documentation to see whether the user’s per-app audio setting is reported to the app, and also check to see if Brave does anything when provided with that information. It works on Fedora, which is a strong suggestion that the latter is not the case, even if the former is.
Brave has had no audio for me for a few weeks now, I’ve no idea what update killed it. I’m using Vivaldi or Chromium now if I want sound. YouTube and Rumble have no sound in Brave v 1.766.82 on Fedora 41 with all updates but they work fine in the other browsers. It might have happened when pipewire was updated.
For me it’s a simple setup, old wired speakers plugged into the speaker port, no bluetooth. It’s perhaps some setting but I’ve not figured it out yet, I just use other browsers if need be.
I’ve not had many pipewire upgrades since buying my current laptop in October last year: one in November, one in February, and then two in March 5 days apart. Those last two being so close together looks out of place, so there might have been something wrong with the first release, but I had no audio or bluetooth issues during that period.
I’m currently using pipewire-0:1.2.7-7.fc41, while the February upgrade (which I assume was your last working version) was to pipewire-0:1.2.7-4.fc41. If you’re not on the latest version you should upgrade. There are some risks in downgrading or rolling back, but if the latest version doesn’t work it could be worthwhile backing up and trying that.
You can find package upgrade history with sudo dnf history info 1..last --reverse --contains-pkgs=pipewire
Thanks, I gave the pipewire downgrade a try but it didn’t help. For now I just have a workaround of using an alternative browser. I generally stay current with Fedora and apply all the updates so I am running the most up to date brave and pipewire along with everything else.
When audio stopped working it took me a bit to realize it was only Brave and everything else was fine. I thought a subsequent update would correct it but that’s not been the case. I thought it could be related to Youtube’s recent adblocker changes but rumble doesn’t work either.
So I just tried to downgrade pipewire, restart Brave, and tested it. No change. I just went back to the current pipewire.
That didn’t work but thanks much for the helpful suggestions.
Full boring details are appended below
Upgrading:
brave-browser x86_64 1.77.95-1 brave-brows 390.5 MiB
replacing brave-browser x86_64 1.76.82-1 brave-brows 388.3 MiB
Total size of inbound packages is 121 MiB. Need to download 121 MiB.
After this operation, 2 MiB extra will be used (install 390 MiB, remove 388 MiB).
Is this ok [y/N]: y
[1/1] brave-browser-0:1.77.95-1.x86_64 100% | 9.6 MiB/s | 120.5 MiB | 00m13s
OK, another update. I removed my entire Brave-Browser configuration and tried to play a Youtube video in a brand new instance. Essentially I renamed /.config/Brave-Browser, did a killall brave, and restarted it. I got a new Brave window without any cookies, bookmarks, history, or anything else. Still no sound. Following that failed idea I just did another killall and restored the old .config directory to get back to what I had.
I am just curious why it’s failed, with hardly any other reports I can find, and no solutions. I always have my workarounds of other browsers, or yt-dlp and vlc to download and play whatever I like. From my perspective Brave is broken but anyone is welcome to correct me.
I looked about and I only found this one place where sound settings are configured on my Fedora install. There’s nothing set for Brave. I then installed the pulseaudio control utility and checked to be sure there was nothing set there either.
