Swallowed Initial Syllables due to Overly Eager Bluetooth Power-Saving

Some Bluetooth headsets, like Otium’s Audio, go into power-saving mode as soon as no sound is played. This happens in every pause in a dialogue, frequent in language learning courses such as Pimsleur’s and causes the first few syllables of every sentence following such a pause to be swallowed.

Work Around

To work around this on Android by keeping your bluetooth connection alive via permanent background sounds:

  1. download some white noise sound file onto your phone, for example,
    • with yt-dlp onto your computer and then onto your phone,
    • or directly with New Pipe
  2. install AIMP,
  3. start AIMP and open the sound file with it (optionally click on repeat in the lower right corner),

  4. lower the sound file volume by, say -50 decibel, by clicking

    1. on the equalizer symbol in the upper right corner,
    2. the burger menu in the lower right corner and,
    3. clicking normalize volume twice.

  5. go to AIMP’s settings page (by clicking the gearwheel),

    • In Sound, Audio Focus, disable the focus option for playing.
    • In Playback, Startup, set it to retake where left
  6. All set. Now just open AIMP every time you need background noise to keep your Bluetooth connection alive, say, when you listen to some dialogue with pauses.

While AIMP is a great player, here it fell victim to its power as other players do not offer the same features, in particular, the missing focus options. Other white noise apps, like Noice have this enabled by default, but while open source, require monthly fees to use local sound files.

Companion Players

Good companions music player apps, say to play the (formerly interrupted) dialogues, are Vanilla Music and Neutron MP.