[Tfug] cell phones and bluetooth audio

[John Gruenenfelder]

On Mon, Aug 14, 2006 at 05:02:45PM -0700, t takahashi wrote:
>
>or maybe the phone can transmit to headset and pc simultaneously, for
>example.  i am new to combining phones with computers using bt or usb,
>so i don't know what is easiest or cheapest.  even if i ditch the
>headset and just record, it would be an improvement.

Those sorts of abilities are between you and your cell phone, for the most
part.  It all depends on what capabilities the phone can use of bluetooth.
Obviously, at a minimum your phone can talk to a headset.  Beyond that, I
can't say.

>restating the question to be sure you got it right, as you just did,
>would be a good way to do things on tfug and other foss fora going
>forward.  a study of confidence versus competence has demonstrated
>that people who are not the most competent are the most likely to
>think that they are.

Hmmm... well, in that regard I can certainly say I'm no BT expert.  I've only
used it as far as getting my headset to work.  Futher information comes from
random questions I've seen flow by on the bluez-users mailing list.

>i will happily glue command line programs together or install a
>module, but if it involves spending hours debugging kernel modules or
>keeping up with where to find them, then it's not an option.  from
>your reading, would you say that "hack something together" is more
>like the former or more like the latter?

I'd say it ought to be like the former.  And the people on the mailing list
seem to be pretty good about some of the harder bluez questions.

>> The tools are not particularly user friendly, but they do work.  Because BT
>
>to me, a scriptable command line program is more user friendly than a
>gnome/kde app.  i'm a little unusual that way.  did you meant that
>they are like the former?

No GUIs that I'm aware of.  It's all command line tools.  By not user
friendly, I meant that sometimes it can be hard to debug a connection error or
some other problems.

When I first started using the bluez tools, I had the BT daemon (hcid) set to
autoconnect.  Because of this, the tools would try to pair with the headset as
soon as I turned it on.  Then when I actually tried to do the pairing, I would
get and "input/output error" and not much better help in the logs.  Turning
off autoconnect and letting the connection form when I would run the "btsco"
program fixed the problem, but it wasn't that easy to track down.


-- 
--John Gruenenfelder    Research Assistant, UMass Amherst student
                        Systems Manager, MKS Imaging Technology, LLC.
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