BlueTooth Speaker Setups....They all require apps

[dman777]

I am looking to use one of those blue tooth speaker systems like Sonos. The only issue is that they have their own apps. I don't want to use Wine or some kind of virtual enviroment to run the app. Any suggestions?

[eyoung100]

Gentoo Bluetooth Wiki. See Desktop Integration.
_________________
The Birth and Growth of Science is the Death and Atrophy of Art -- Unknown
Registerd Linux User #363735
Adopt a Post | Strip Comments| Emerge Wrapper

[Telemin]

Hi,

Can you find yourself a speaker that supports pure A2DP? I have had success using bluetooth headphones via A2DP in the past. A seemingly up to date tutorial is available on the wiki for this. Downsides are that no metadata is passed through if you wanted this displayed on a screen of some type. Perhaps a friend has one of these that you can test, or a trip to the local (best buy/currys/location appropriate tech store) with your laptop to do some testing before you buy?

Beyond that there is perhaps the possibility of taking alternate approaches to the same goal of ~wireless speaker. For example, are you able to go the route of headless pulseaudio server on say a raspberry pi + some normal speaker(s) which accept a line level input? This is my current approach to audio playback, although it does require at minimum a reliable wireless network to connect everything.

A further route to go down is some DLNA type player + appropriate server somewhere.

As I have no knowledge of your particular situation I am unable to offer more specific advice, but please let us know how you get on! This kind of hardware is woefully under supported on linux at the moment, so please document your successes somewhere for those who follow:)

Good Luck

-Telemin-

P.S @eyoung100

[hephooey]

If you use pulseaudio and bluez it probably works out of box. I have been use a bluetooth receiver (http://www.amazon.com/Logitech-Wireless-Speaker-Adapter-Bluetooth/dp/B004VM1T5S) connected to my speaker for years now, I also have several headset with A2DP/HSP they all works fine. If both your computer and your spearker support bluetooth there should be no problem paring/using them (There are proprietary codecs like apt-x linux does not support, but sbr is good enough for my ear). Just make sure you have bluetooth in USE when emerging the relevant packages you should be fine. For higher level software I use KDE, so bluedevil+kmix is the obvious choice. After pairing the device the output sink appears automatically in kmix, then I can route audio to/from it on the fly. I assume other DE like gnome have similar tools.

[eyoung100]