I’ve been intrigued by my new Samsung phone’s apparent ability to stream music to my laptop via Bluetooth. Ubuntu doesn’t appear to be able to do this out of the box and I had no idea where to search for this.
Today, I found the secret, thanks to this page:
After a few people asking me how to use the A2DP Sink with BlueZ, I’ve decided to write this mini-tutorial with a step-by-step on how to establish a A2DP stream from any device to a BlueZ-enabled host.
Before we start the hands-on, let’s see a little bit of nomenclature. In our use-case we have an stream being transmitted between two devices through a pipeline. Our pipeline is constructed of the remote host, BlueZ and PulseAudio. Each element of this pipeline has a Source (SRC) and a Sink (SNK) interface. The stream is handled between different elements by being sent from one element’s source to another element’s sink. So, the big picture of our pipeline is something like this (with the stream being represented by an arrow):
It’s still wonky out the wazoo but it looks like it can be done. I will wrestle with this more this evening.