Tune Your Galaxy Buds With This Open Source Desktop App

Bluetooth earbuds are quite common these days, and there have been many companies making them. One of them is Samsung, which makes the Buds, Buds Live, Buds+ and Buds Pro earbuds.

Sadly Samsung does not provide a universal desktop application to adjust the settings of these earbuds for users, and hence, they are stuck with the mobile application (Galaxy Wearables) if they wish to tune and adjust the settings of their earbuds. But luckily, there is an alternative to that.

“Galaxy Buds Client” is an open source desktop application that works on Windows, macOS and Linux which allows you to modify the settings of your Samsung earbuds however you like. While it is an unofficial software (not developed by Samsung), it is almost an identical replica of the official Samsung mobile app.

You can download the program from its releases page on GitHub. Additionally, Galaxy Buds Client is available to install on Linux from Flathub:

https://flathub.org/apps/me.timschneeberger.GalaxyBudsClient

After installation, you will be required to set up your Bluetooth earbuds:

Once done, you’ll be able to see the dashboard which shows you the current charging level of your earbuds as well as the charging case:

There are many option pages there, but the equalizer is perhaps the most important one. You can change the current sound mode, as well as the right/left sound balance:

One of the best features about the Samsung earbuds is the “seamless connection” feature, which enables you to instantly connect your earbuds to multiple devices whenever you choose after connecting to them for the first time. You can enable this feature from the “advanced settings” page:

In this way, your earbuds will be automatically turned on when you take them out from the charging case, and they could be also instantly connected to your PC when you disconnect them from your smartphone, for example.

Finally, there are some system actions that you can apply on your earbuds, such as resetting their settings or downloading a newer firmware version. All from this same software:

The software is quite good in its job. Kudos to the developers for making such a nice desktop application which Samsung itself sadly didn’t provide!

However, it may be worthy to note that some debugging data is shared by default with the developers in order to enhance the software, which is mentioned in the releases page itself:

This application collects crash dumps in case of fatal application crashes and sends them to my sentry.io dashboard. To help me support Buds models I don’t own, this app includes a crowdsourcing feature to share data about Samsung’s proprietary Bluetooth serial protocol on demand. You can disable this permanently by navigating to ‘Settings > Developer options’.

You can visit the Galaxy Buds Manager web page on GitHub to view the source code or learn more information about it.

M.Hanny Sabbagh

With a B.Sc and M.Sc in Computer Science & Engineering, Hanny brings more than a decade of experience with Linux and open-source software. He has developed Linux distributions, desktop programs, web applications and much more. All of which attracted tens of thousands of users over many years. He additionally maintains other open-source related platforms to promote it in his local communities.

Hanny is the founder of FOSS Post.