Old laptop = a2dp reciever for PPC stereo?

[Dishe]

This may be off topic for the forum, but I'm wondering if I could throw some ideas around in the hopes that perhaps someone from here has done something similar and could offer suggestions.

I've got this old IBM thinkpad attached to my stereo system which I use as a streaming media computer for my music (obsolete laptop, but good for playing internet streams or media files on my home network over the stereo).

I very often attach my pocket pc (HTC Titan) as my music player to the stereo as well, usually using a portable a2dp receiver with a 3.5" port (i.tech r35, to be exact) to stream music wirelessly.

Problem with this is that I constantly need to charge the r35 adapter because it won't charge the battery while playing music (poor design choice).
The obvious solution, since my laptop is always hooked up anyway, would be to add a bluetooth dongle to the laptop and use it at a receiver.
I tried this, but sadly WinXP does not support the A2DP profile in its native stack, and I don't have a valid license for any of the third party ones (broadcomm, Bluesoleil, etc).

Is there a simple way to support a2dp stream receiving from this laptop? An open-source bluetooth stack perhaps?
The truth is, I don't really need *windows* on there for what I use it for, I would be open to installing a linux distro if it had a2dp support built in (and wasn't too complicated to install and use... I've got very limited linux experience).
What do you guys think?

[Dishe]

nobody has any pointers?

[shandar]

Wouldnt it be easier to do via wifi? Better range and higher quality than A2DP too?

[mapleman321]

i've used my wizard to stream to my laptop before with just the native bluetooth stack on the laptop

i'm sure you could just buy a bluetooth dongle and sync it via A2DP that way

[thenext1]

Download bluesoleil, it has an A2DP server you can use to send audio from PPC to the laptop.

[Dishe]

Wouldnt it be easier to do via wifi? Better range and higher quality than A2DP too?

Um... I'm not sure that you understood the concept here. First of all, when properly configured, a2dp is virtually indistinguishable to wired speakers when dealing with mp3 files (you lose a slight amount since it IS compressing the data, but not any more than a well encoded mp3). Second, range isn't an issue since I plan to control the music from the room I'm in (why would u want to play the music in a room far enough away that u can't hear it?).
Third, unless I haven't heard of a new Wifi audio protocol, I think what you're talking about is TOTALLY different. I stream music to my stereo from networked computers all the time, but thats not what I'm talking about here.
I use my ppc as my personal music player, and sometimes I want my playlist on the ppc to come out of the stereo system in my house. A2dp lets u do that by simply BEING IN THE SAME ROOM AS IT. I frankly don't see how WiFi would be an acceptable alternative to this since there is no audio transport support built in- its designed mostly for just networking.

I'd love to be proved wrong, so please share with me if I'm missing something here, but how would Wifi be better?

thenext1, I actually have bluesoleil, but its not registered to my device so its stuck on a 5mb trial version (5mb of info and it stops). I was thinking of something free / open source, which is why I thought about a linux option. if there is a free windows stack for A2dp, I'd love to try it...

[surgex0]

This looks intersting I am about to try this bluesolei

What I'm looking to do is actually route calls to my laptop mic and speakers when my phone is docked in the cradle...

I'm thinking since this is the same principle that it can be accomplished?

Let me know if anyone has done this before...

it is kind of "off-topic" but i think it was relavent to post here because it deals with the same principles

[thenext1]

This looks intersting I am about to try this bluesolei

What I'm looking to do is actually route calls to my laptop mic and speakers when my phone is docked in the cradle...

I'm thinking since this is the same principle that it can be accomplished?

Let me know if anyone has done this before...

it is kind of "off-topic" but i think it was relavent to post here because it deals with the same principles

It's not the same principle, A2DP is for hi-quality audio, you are trying to make the handsfree profile work.... It should work, since bluesoleil can also do that

[shandar]

Um... I'm not sure that you understood the concept here. First of all, when properly configured, a2dp is virtually indistinguishable to wired speakers when dealing with mp3 files (you lose a slight amount since it IS compressing the data, but not any more than a well encoded mp3). Second, range isn't an issue since I plan to control the music from the room I'm in (why would u want to play the music in a room far enough away that u can't hear it?).
Third, unless I haven't heard of a new Wifi audio protocol, I think what you're talking about is TOTALLY different. I stream music to my stereo from networked computers all the time, but thats not what I'm talking about here.
I use my ppc as my personal music player, and sometimes I want my playlist on the ppc to come out of the stereo system in my house. A2dp lets u do that by simply BEING IN THE SAME ROOM AS IT. I frankly don't see how WiFi would be an acceptable alternative to this since there is no audio transport support built in- its designed mostly for just networking.

I'd love to be proved wrong, so please share with me if I'm missing something here, but how would Wifi be better?
Wow. You have got some aggression issues.

First of all, read through the entire post above and replace A2DP with WiFi and see what comes out. There is no advantage of using A2DP over Wifi if you have wifi on your phone. Set up a simple streaming server on your mobile then stream it over Wifi to your laptop. After the first configuration you run one application on your phone and press play in whichever media player you have on your laptop to start the music. Dead easy. Full quality, no reencoding or anything. Control the music from your PDA etc etc.

Not entirely sure what you are on about with the range? Wifi works perfectly if you're in the same room, what's A2DPs advantage? You dont have to stand 100 m from your stereo just because you're using wifi :)

Oh, and reencoded A2DP is _not_ indistinguishable from MP3s on normal speakers. Unless you mean laptop speakers. A2DP is a lossy encoding that is limited by the connection speed (and thus signal strength) which means that you have to be right next to the bluetooth receiver to get maximum quality. As you move away from the receiver the signal will drop, thus the speed will drop along with sound quality. Same thing happens with Wifi but the lowest connection speed over Wifi is still way beyond what you need to stream music at decent quality.

And.. ehm.. Both wifi and bluetooth are ways to transfer data, A2DP is just a protocol like FTP or HTTP. No magic there, Bluetooth and Wifi are basically the same thing but with different bandwidth and range capacities. In this case you'd use HTTP to transfer the music over Wifi instead of A2DP over Bluetooth, result is the same.

[surgex0]

why isn't it the same principle?
my motorols HT820 headphones are A2DP and it has a microphone on them and i use it as a headset and to play music
...
BTW if you're looking for something free and linuxy why not use VLC over wifi
i'm almost positive they have a mobile client and it would def. be better than a2dp

[bananaboy]

I have to say I share the thread starter's frustration on this. Perhaps a little clarification is in order.

A2DP is far better suited to the purpose than a stream server on wifi in this case, because was simply designed to do exactly what Dishe is trying to do - connect an audio source to an audio sink without wires. Given the right software stack, all this should involve is a quick pairing procedure.

Streaming audio on the other hand, especially from a mobile device, is somewhat tedious - hacky at best, but certainly not "dead simple". You'd have to set up a stream server, probably third party and definitely not part of standard wifi installs. A audio streaming server on a mobile device could prove to be quite a resource hog as well. Attempting to this so in a time where bluetooth dongles (especially the made in china ones) that come with Bluesoleil go for next to nothing sounds like unnecessary fuss to me.

About a solution, I think picking up a cheap bluetooth dongle with Bluesoleil installed would be the most painless way to go. Linux and bluetooth don't exactly play nice from experience, but I've never actually tried to run an A2DP sink on it. You could do some reading on BlueZ, which is linux's standard stack and see if anyone else has had any luck.

Right now, A2DP sources are more common on PC stacks than A2DP sinks - people usually want to send audio out to a wireless headset or something instead of recieve audio - so google doesn't seem to be of much help. I'm currently trying to get it to work as well, and will test BlueSoleil within the week or so on a Windows computer and post back here if it works. Don't hold your breath, though.