2016 A.D.: bluetooth audio yet?

[Bill Evans at Mariposa]

I searched the FreeBSD forums for any mention of an applicaton which will send sound to a bluetooth pair of headphones. The answer was "not yet", but the most recent such answer that I found was in 2013.

Anythiing newer than that for FreeBSD bluetooth audio?

 

[kpa]

Bluetooth support in FreeBSD is less than satisfactory and there is no one working on it at the moment. I browsed a bit at the FreeBSD SVNWeb and found that the last commits to the bluetooth code are from about two years ago and those are just minor fixes because of changed kernel programming APIs and commits to add vendor and devices IDs for devices that weren't detected *) Most of the other code hasn't been touched in about 8 years. Don't hold your hopes up too high for getting bluetooth audio ever working on FreeBSD.

*) One such commit: https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=255345

 

[Juha Nurmela]

I've used the following with a crappy 5$ Bt-audio receiver. No idea if it works with anything else.
It needs the SBC encoder marked

 *  Bluetooth low-complexity, subband codec (SBC) library
*
*  Copyright (C) 2004-2008  Marcel Holtmann <marcel@holtmann.org>
*  Copyright (C) 2004-2005  Henryk Ploetz <henryk@ploetzli.ch>
*  Copyright (C) 2005-2008  Brad Midgley <bmidgley@xmission.com>

I cannot remember where it came from, sourceforge I think.

Juha

The encoder is now at https://sourceforge.net/projects/sbc/ but the API has changed a bit.
Sigh, https://github.com/pcacjr/bluez/blob/master/sbc/sbc.c
looks more like the old one.

Juha

Found the box (strange). Part number Biltema 24-191, "Bluetooth mottagare för musik". Initially some kind of Apple bolt-on peripheral. Not sold any more, that's why it was in the clearout basket with the red sticker. Replaced by item 24-192

 

[Snurg]

And with this SBC encoder you had success getting FreeBSD stream A2DP audio?

 

[Juha Nurmela]

I hesitate with that exact A2DP term, but audio plays with reasonable quality.

Juha

 

[Juha Nurmela]

Another 5$ bluetooth speaker was on sale last week. It did not want to play ball like the old one, without dancing first. Inside the small plastic sodacan (polystyrene, not ABS like advertised...) was a BT076 module, Jtron AC1610E chip. ogooglebar it seems :I

It does not respond to sdpcontrol browse, but sdpcontrol search 17 and 19 show it's also an A2DP gizmo.

Starts to play after blind handshakes with default options.
Likes to make extra dings and dongs just like the older one.