BlackBerry Bold and Remote Stereo Gateway
by Volker Weber
This took three months. Today, the promised BlackBerry Bold showed up in a FedEx box, along with a Bluetooth gateway, which is already connected to the Sonos line-in. Now I can finally return the other Bold I have been holding at ransom to RIM. :-)
Comments
OK, I'll admit to being lost - what service will that provide to the Sonos? Is it some form of controller?
The gateway supports the Bluetooth A2DP profile. You can send stereo music over Bluetooth and it is converted to an analog signal, which the Sonos can play through its speakers. This allows me to send music to the stereo from any device supporting the A2DP profile.
The interesting thing is that a Sonos player can share it's line-in with any other Sonos player in the house. If a visitor has interesting music on his phone, I can pair the gateway with one button press and then play the music throughout the house. If it's not an iPhone that is. The iPhone currently does not support A2DP.
What would be really cool is if Sonos would provide an audio capture for my Macs which would send to Sonos player over the network instead. That however is not available.
I tried to use the Sonos system to provide a more substantial soundtrack when playing movies on my laptop. Microsoft's WMA streaming server on the laptop was set up to stream the output in a format that could be used as an internet radio stream on the Sonos. Did not work for my use case, at all, because the delay was staggering (as I could have guessed beforehand). Sound quality was alright, however, even though the signal underwent an additional encoding and decoding step.
Maybe there's a comparable solution for the Mac. Delay is a non issue when playing music, I'd say.
Now that I think about it, I hope this is not a solution that I picked up from vowe.net in the first place ;-)
The issue here is buffering. This introduces the time lag.
Providing audio out as a stream is a cool idea. Thank you for that.
On the mac you can use Nicecast in order to stream the audio to the Sonos. There will be a delay as well.
For video, you can get VLC to stream the audio to your Sonos. VLC is even able to delay the video for a bit, so you can try to get in into sync with the audio again. But beware this solution has a WAF of -10000 and is hard to set up.
Have you tried connecting the Mac via A2DP?
May work with newer Macs only. May require Apple built-in Bluetooth. Will require Leopard.
Yes, that is what I use the gateway for. I am just wondering why I need another connection to the Sonos player, when I already have a 100 mbps network connection.
Why not use an Airport with the line out connected to the Sonos? Or are you trying to control from the Sonos controller? Of course, with the Airport, you could control the music from an iPhone/iTouch...
Not the slickest control with two different interfaces, but a single unit if using an iPhone/iTouch.
However (as usual), I'm probably missing something.
Jon
Simple: AXP can only play from iTunes. The gateway can play everything going through "output" or "system". Which is a very powerful thing, especially with SoundSource :
