Insider Preview Build 21370: Microsoft Improves Bluetooth and Introduces AAC

Not always on Wednesday, but only on Thursday, this time Microsoft released a new Insider Preview build of Windows 10. With the Insider Preview Build 21370, Microsoft introduces improvements to Bluetooth audio handling.

The update is primarily of interest to anyone who uses a Bluetooth headset or headphones on a Windows 10 PC and often switches back and forth between playing music and using a microphone. In volume settings, a Bluetooth headset or headphones were always displayed twice. With these two entries, a distinction was made between the loudspeaker channel and the communication channel. The former does not offer microphone support, but has better audio quality, so that it is used only when playback is about to occur, but there should be no communication or recording through the microphone. On the other hand, later, communication was enabled in both directions, but in general the sound quality was reduced via Bluetooth.

Windows 10 automatically switches to bluetooth mode

With Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 21370, Microsoft has removed this separation in volume control and Windows now always automatically switches between the two modes to significantly simplify the handling of Bluetooth devices on PCs.

AAC for better sound quality

In addition, the audio codec in Windows Insider Preview supports the AAC, Advanced Audio Codec, which is not lossless, but still provides better sound quality than the SBC, Low Complexity subband codec.

However, the list of other changes at this time is small:

• We made some small adjustments to the icon in the address bar of the file explorer.
• We have improved the Touch Keyboard launch animation to make it smooth in cases when the UWP app removes it when it appears.
• We’ve made a change so that if you focus on the run dialog, the touch keyboard will now show the backslash () key.

On the other hand, like known problems, the list of fixed errors is very long:

• bug fixes
  • [News and interests] We fixed an issue where the flyout might not open, sometimes hovering over the news and interests buttons.
  • [News and interests] We fixed an issue where news and interests might get stuck while flying, displaying spinning dots.
  • [News and interests] We did some explorers. Reliability and performance improvements are made.
  • [News and interests] We have fixed an issue where news and interests can sometimes appear on the taskbar when the taskbar is aligned at the top.
  • We fixed an issue as a result of some builders seeing error 0x80092004 when installing KB5001030 – 2021-02 Cumulative Update Preview .NET Framework 3.5 and 4.8 after updating to previous builds.
  • We fixed an issue that could have resulted from insiders viewing the error 0x80070005 while installing the framework update.
  • We had an explorer in the last flight. Fixed the exe crash, which could be a problem with the login screen and logging after restarting from sleep.
  • We fixed a problem that resulted in some insiders experiencing a CRITICAL PROCESS DIED error.
  • We fixed an issue where the login was not announcing the error message on the screen after entering the wrong password several times.
  • We fixed an issue that resulted in broken characters appearing in the text in settings.
  • We fixed a problem with the last couple of flights that resulted in Cortana not launching from the taskbar after clicking the icon.
  • We fixed an issue affecting mouse input on the dual boot screen.
  • We fixed issues with translating the –help text into the Windows subsystem for Linux.
  • When using the Windows subsystem for Linux, we fixed the OS upgrade by making copies of libdxcore.so and other files.
  • We determined two issues affecting conhost.exe reliability.
  • We have fixed two issues to prevent some USB printer drivers from starting correctly.
  • We fixed an issue where if you send a VK_HOME virtual key code while the Japanese IME is activated and the numberlock is on, there will be an unexpected 7 input.
  • We fixed an issue where the Japanese 50-on touch keyboard layout was not correctly inserting full-width space characters when it was in the shift state.
  • If you selected a cloud candidate when the cloud candidate entry was still loading then we fixed an issue in which the Chinese Pinyin IME was inserting a placeholder string.
• Known issues
  • When we are trying to install a new build, we are seeing reports of the update process hanging for an extended period of time.
  • We are investigating an issue where elements of the search (including the search box in the file explorer) are no longer displayed correctly in a dark subject.
  • Currently the Windows Camera app does not honor the default brightness settings set through the new Camera Settings page.
  • We are working on a fix as a result of WSL users finding the performance of the file explorer launch they received after upgrading to build 21354 and higher.
  • Some Windows subsystems for Linux instances may fail to launch with the ‘Parameter is incorrect’ message. This known issue is being tracked here at the WSL repository.

As always, the current Windows 10 Insider preview build 21370 is available to all participants Windows 10 insider program Now available for download in Dev channel. Microsoft Flight Hub Windows 10 also lists all the development lists that have been released so far.