Routing audio to Bluetooth Headset (non-A2DP) on Android
- by Jayesh
I have a non-A2DP single ear BT headset (Plantronics 510) and would like to use it with my Android HTC Magic to listen to low quality audio like podcasts/audio books.
After much googling I found that only phone call audio can be routed to the non-A2DP BT headsets. (I would like to know if you have found a ready solution to route all kinds of audio to non-A2DP BT headsets)
So I figured, somehow programmatically I can channel the audio to the stream that carries phone call audio. This way I will fool the phone to carry my mp3 audio to my BT headset. I wrote following simple code.
import android.content.*;
import android.app.Activity;
import android.os.Bundle;
import android.media.*;
import java.io.*;
import android.util.Log;
public class BTAudioActivity extends Activity
{
private static final String TAG = "BTAudioActivity";
private MediaPlayer mPlayer = null;
private AudioManager amanager = null;
@Override
public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState)
{
super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
setContentView(R.layout.main);
amanager = (AudioManager) getSystemService(Context.AUDIO_SERVICE);
amanager.setBluetoothScoOn(true);
amanager.setMode(AudioManager.MODE_IN_CALL);
mPlayer = new MediaPlayer();
try {
mPlayer.setDataSource(new FileInputStream(
"/sdcard/sample.mp3").getFD());
mPlayer.setAudioStreamType(AudioManager.STREAM_VOICE_CALL);
mPlayer.prepare();
mPlayer.start();
} catch(Exception e) {
Log.e(TAG, e.toString());
}
}
@Override
public void onDestroy()
{
mPlayer.stop();
amanager.setMode(AudioManager.MODE_NORMAL);
amanager.setBluetoothScoOn(false);
super.onDestroy();
}
}
As you can see I tried combinations of various methods that I thought will fool the phone to believe my audio is a phone call:
Using MediaPlayer's setAudioStreamType(STREAM_VOICE_CALL)
using AudioManager's setBluetoothScoOn(true)
using AudioManager's setMode(MODE_IN_CALL)
But none of the above worked. If I remove the AudioManager calls in the above code, the audio plays from speaker and if I replace them as shown above then the audio stops coming from speakers, but it doesn't come through the BT headset. So this might be a partial success.
I have checked that the BT headset works alright with phone calls.
There must be a reason for Android not supporting this. But I can't let go of the feeling that it is not possible to programmatically reroute the audio. Any ideas?
P.S. above code needs following permission
<uses-permission android:name="android.permission.MODIFY_AUDIO_SETTINGS"/>
