Lauscher

Lauscher — Sony headphone control for Sailfish OS

Lauscher talks to your Sony headphones the way Sony's own phone app does, over Bluetooth: it reads their battery levels and settings and lets you change them from your SailfishOS device, without an account, a cloud service or a second phone.

It is a control channel, not an audio one. Your music keeps playing over the usual Bluetooth route while Lauscher is open.

What it shows and changes

• Connect. Lists the paired devices that speak MDR, and only those; phones, speakers and car kits never appear. If exactly one supported headset is already connected when the app starts, it opens straight away.
• Reconnect by itself. Buds going into their case take the control channel with them, which is not a fault. The app waits, says what it is waiting for, and picks the session up when the headset comes back.
• Battery and identity. Per-side battery levels, model name, firmware, serial and the codec in use.
• Playback. Track names, play/pause, next and previous, and volume as a percentage.
• Ambient sound control. Off, noise cancelling, ambient sound with its level, and focus on voice.
• Listening modes. Standard, background music with its distance, cinema, voice boost and sound leakage reduction — whichever of them the device advertises.
• Equalizer. The presets the headset itself reports, the band steps as a strip of faders (five bands or ten, whichever the device has), and clear bass where it exists.
• DSEE. Sony's upscaling, under its own name — DSEE, DSEE HX, DSEE Ultimate — as the device reports it.
• Connected devices (multipoint). Which source devices the headset holds, which of them has playback, moving playback between them, and whether the headset may move it by itself.
• The headset's own settings. The booleans the device defines, multipoint among them, and what its Bluetooth link is tuned for: sound quality or connection stability.
• Cover page. Battery, volume and the active mode at a glance, with cover actions for the listening mode, the background music distance and the ambient sound control — whichever two of those the device has.

Lauscher shows only what your headset advertises. Two Sony models rarely offer the same set of features, so a section that is missing is one this device did not offer — the LinkBuds Clip, for instance, is open-ear and has no noise cancelling at all.

Before you start

Pair the headset in the Bluetooth settings first. Lauscher lists what is paired and speaks the Sony protocol, and connects on tap. If your headset is paired but missing from the list, connect it once in the Bluetooth settings so the phone reads its services again.

Only one app can hold the control channel at a time. Leaving the device page closes it on purpose, so Sony's own app — or another phone — can take over right away.

Devices

Developed and tested against the Sony LinkBuds Clip and the WF-C700N, on a Jolla Phone (2026). Other Sony headsets speaking the same protocol are expected to work, and the app shows whichever features they report. Community members report that devices like WH-1000XM4 and its generation is also working. Reports welcome!

Development

Please post bugs, errors and improvement suggestions as issues on GitHub: https://github.com/Wunderfitz/harbour-lauscher/issues

Interested people can also join our Telegram Group to exchange ideas, debug builds etc: https://t.me/+lLi7QF5RCC4xZDMy

Languages

English and German.

Credits and licence

The protocol is spoken by libmdr from the SonyHeadphonesClient project (MIT), formatting inside it uses fmt (MIT), and the Bluetooth connection is set up by BlueZ through the profile API bluetoothd already offers every app on the phone.

Lauscher is free software under the GNU GPLv3 or later. Sources: https://github.com/Wunderfitz/harbour-lauscher

Lauscher is an independent project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed or certified by Sony.

Lauscher was written together with Claude, Anthropic's AI assistant, in Claude Code.