A2DP Bluetooth support confirmed in Leopard

I've always found it surprising that Apple did not have support for the A2DP Bluetooth audio profile in Tiger. A2DP is the profile for stereo music, as opposed to the lower quality mono profile for standard phone headsets. It was rumored, but not confirmed by Apple, that Leopard would fill this hole, and now it appears that's exactly what has happened. Ryan at Thoughts Abound has successfully set up Leopard with his Motorola S805 Bluetooth stereo headset to stream music wirelessly from iTunes. Not only that, he notes that "AVRCP is included as well so you can control your music from the controls on your headphones or stereo."
Unfortunately, A2DP compresses the audio, so it's not exactly a high-fidelity solution. But if you really want to listen to your tunes from your Mac without wires, this is probably the way to go.
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I've always found it surprising that Apple did not have support for the A2DP Bluetooth audio profile in Tiger. A2DP is the profile for...
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I just paired my Motorola S9 with my Macbook, running Leopard, and it still doesn't work in stereo. Leopard was done with a clean install, so I know that it didn't carry over from when I was running Tiger. Can you please tell me what I'm doing wrong?
Thanks
I would recommend the 'Trust' ultrasmall Bluetooth adapter for adding Bluetooth support.
http://bluetoothinsight.blogspot.com/2007/12/ultra-small-bluetooth-usb-adapter.html
The low profile is really nice.
Hi jason - is this 'Trust'-Thing working with Leopard? On the Trust-HP is only Windows named.
January 22 2008 at 8:25 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyIs there any osx-scientist, who can cut out the a2dp bluetooth thing and make it work as add-on-software for tiger?
That would be grrreat! Best, Olé
I'm really surprised how crappy the a2dp support is in leopard... I have a motorola S9 headset which works flawlessly with my at&t tilt and blackberry 8200... Sound is great, never skips, etc... So I 'know' the headphones work great...
However, on the MBP with Leopard they sound soooo bad I can't even listen to them... The skip, hiss and have a ton of static... I tried re-pairing with headphones only (as suggested) and it still sucks!
I hope apple fixes this issue before they try putting A2DP on the iphone...
Very disappointing, I upgraded to Leopard 'partly' because of A2DP support... That being said Leopard is great... I'm eagerly awaiting Apples bluetooth update...
-LeoD
Were you able to use the headset as *both* a stereo output device *and* a sound input device? I could not with a Motorola S805: either the stereo sound is disabled, or the microphone is disabled. I don't know whether this limitation is caused by the Mac or the headset. This is a big issue for gaming where you need both at the same time (it works fine in mono).
November 14 2007 at 10:33 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply"I've always found it surprising that Apple did not have support for the A2DP Bluetooth audio profile in Tiger."
You're kidding me? They want people to buy airport express and use airtunes. They did include A2DP in Leopard now because they were out of excuses not to do so, but they made sure quality was bad enough not to hurt airport sales. Nothing new under the sun.
I just got a A2DP headset, and didn't realize Tiger never had this feature. It works fine on Leopard on my MBP, but the audio gets choppy sometimes when I walk more than 10ft away, and then other times not, even when I'm in another room.
I actually considered buying an iPod Touch so I could have a wireless iPod, then realized it doesn't in fact have Bluetooth at all. That's lame. It's double-lame that the iPhone doesn't support A2DP. Isn't the point that it's a PHONE + IPOD?! Why would users not want that?
I have a brand new plantronics 590a headset and while it sounds rather good for music it's basically unusable with skype. It just cuts every now and then and the sound quality as a headset is much much worse. At some point I just went back to my older USB headset.
I do have a bluetooth keyboard and mouse (from Apple). I hoped those wouldn't intefere but apparenty they do or something else does.
So far, it's just a decorative blue blinking thing in my living room. I don't know if a firmware or software update could fix that.
I tested out the A2DP the day after installing Leopard with a pair of Plantronics BT headphones. It works pretty well but the compression does change the overall sound a little and I still found the implementation to be a little buggy.
http://fuzzz.gaulin.ca/2007/10/28/properly-enable-stereo-bluetooth-a2dp-in-leopard/
Here is another adapter compatible with the iphone - a bit expensive $99,
http://www.8bananas.com/products/srs-200bd.html
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