Making Stereo Bluetooth Headphones Work on Mac

Wednesday September 12th 2007, 5:49 pm Printer Friendly Version
Filed under:Miscellany
Posted By: Matt

At work I listen to music almost constantly, for reasons I’m sure anyone who shares an office with a Frenchman will intuitively grasp. And I’ve been annoyed by every approach I’ve tried to plugging in my headphones. For ages I used a long extension cord, which was constantly falling off my desk and dragging my head with it. Since I got my Mac Book Pro I’ve been plugging my iPod headphones into it, but the cord is so short that my head movement is severely restricted.

So I decided to get some wireless headphones. Cursory research revealed that there isn’t any way to use normal stereo bluetooth headphones with a Mac and get reasonable sound quality (without using a separate bluetooth dongle, which is one more fiddly little gadget to lose or forget while I’m traveling). This requires a standard called A2DP that (amazingly) is not supported in Mac OS X Tiger. (I guess it will be in Leopard.) Luckily I discovered a program called a2dpcast by Tim Hewett which lets you stream via A2DP. I’m using the brand new version which creates a new audio output source called Stereo Bluetooth Headset right in the audio preferences (scroll to the end of the comments in the provided link for installation info). It’s working flawlessly for me so far.

Thanks, Tim!


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