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[mwillems]

So I'd been tooling around for a while trying to find a convenient way to allow my friends to play music through my main living room system.  Because I use JRiver as an active crossover/processor, music has to go through JRiver somehow to come out of my big speakers at all.  So I'd been looking into using a bluetooth dongle to allow phones to pair with the computer and stream to it directly, with the idea being that the output would then get picked up by the JRiver WDM driver and fed back out.

I tried four or five different Bluetooth dongles and none of them worked (or in one case they would've worked with an older version of windows, but not with Win 10).  I finally found this dongle, which actually works: http://www.amazon.com/Kensington-Bluetooth-Adapter-Laptops-K33956AM/dp/B00B2HVAT0

Steps to get up and running:

1) Plug it in
2) Go to the Kensington website and download the windows drivers (they say they're for Win 7 and 8, but I can confirm that they work fine in Win 10).
3) Install the drivers and reboot.
4) For maximum convenience/automation, I recommend setting up your WDM driver setup as described in the wiki: http://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/WDM_Driver#Problems_With_Streaming_Video_Using_Media_Center.27s_Internal_Browser_and.2For_Erasing_Playing_Now
5) Pair your phone with the computer, and stream to it the same way you'd stream to any bluetooth audio device.

On my machine this pops up a little "player window," the WDM kicks on, and instant music!

Guests will have to go through step 5 to pair their phones, but that's a fairly painless way for guests to wirelessly stream music from their phones.  More interestingly, it also allows for on-demand audio app casting to your PC.  

This is a big step forward in terms of improving wife and friend acceptance of my PC-only audio solution, so I'm excited    Certainly more than worth the $20 I paid for the working adapter, although maybe not worth the $85 total I wound up spending on non-working adapters (but I hate to quit halfway through a project   )

[dmarkovi]

very cool. I was looking for this exact solution.

Is it possible to have the bluetoother signal repeated so I can cover the whole house?

[mwillems]

I don't know of a way to do that and my recollection is that WDM inputs don't work with streaming yet, but if that gets implemented that would be a potential solution.  Meanwhile we're stuck with bluetooth range

[RoderickGI]

Well done in getting it working. Bluetooth can be a real pain, but once working, it is great.

I put a combined Bluetooth and Wireless adapter in my HTPC build to enable such connectivity. An Intel® Centrino® Advanced-N 6235. I still haven't done a great deal of it, because we are still an iDevice household, so I'm using Airplay.

My intention though, was to use Wi-Fi Direct and Miracast to allow higher bandwidth and more universal connectivity support, when combined with Bluetooth and Airplay, so Android, Windows, and iDevices including tablets could connect to my HTPC to share content. I'll get there eventually.

Do you know what connection speed you are getting with Bluetooth? I think there are tools to measure the speed achieved.

Speed and range were my main concerns with relying on Bluetooth, which is really aimed at low power, short range connections, with corresponding lower bandwidth. The bandwidth of Bluetooth 4.0 and above is probably fine for all music streaming including high quality lossless files, where the device is in the same room. But I was concerned what may happen if a phone streaming music was moving around the house, in someone's pocket. Probably not an issue, and I guess most of the time when sharing music like this, you would be sitting in the room where the HTPC and speakers are. 

[mwillems]

Well done in getting it working. Bluetooth can be a real pain, but once working, it is great.

I put a combined Bluetooth and Wireless adapter in my HTPC build to enable such connectivity. An Intel® Centrino® Advanced-N 6235. I still haven't done a great deal of it, because we are still an iDevice household, so I'm using Airplay.

My intention though, was to use Wi-Fi Direct and Miracast to allow higher bandwidth and more universal connectivity support, when combined with Bluetooth and Airplay, so Android, Windows, and iDevices including tablets could connect to my HTPC to share content. I'll get there eventually.

Do you know what connection speed you are getting with Bluetooth? I think there are tools to measure the speed achieved.

Speed and range were my main concerns with relying on Bluetooth, which is really aimed at low power, short range connections, with corresponding lower bandwidth. The bandwidth of Bluetooth 4.0 and above is probably fine for all music streaming including high quality lossless files, where the device is in the same room. But I was concerned what may happen if a phone streaming music was moving around the house, in someone's pocket. Probably not an issue, and I guess most of the time when sharing music like this, you would be sitting in the room where the HTPC and speakers are. 

It's a bluetooth 4.0 connection, but the range is not stellar.  It's just designed to get me a general purpose input into the HTPC for when a friend says: let me play you this thing off my phone. In the olden days before I had active speakers I just had a stereo to RCA adapter permanently hanging off my receiver so folks could plug in.  But with the active speakers it has to go through the computer and JRiver's not always the best at handling a live-input stream from an analog source.  So bluetooth seemed like an easy answer for that use case, and the range is better than the old RCA to stereo adapter 

For daily use I've everyone in the house trained on Gizmo/JRemote (or to use the web interface on the PC itself) all of which are far more flexible :-)

[dmarkovi]

Have you seen the "eero"? It looks like it can daisy-chain Bluetooth.

[mattkhan]

am I right in thinking there is no way to have multiple instances of the WDM driver? or any way to detect what the source of the content is?

I am thinking of a use case where 1 PC serves 2 physical locations (e.g. I could have a phone in one room throwing amazon prime audio at my pc which routes that out to zone 2 while someone else is watching youtube on the PC itself in the main room).

[mwillems]

I'm not aware of a a way to have multiple instances of the WDM driver or to distinguish based on content.  That kind of functionality would effectively require JRiver to implement a mixer in their driver

[mattkhan]

I'm not aware of a a way to have multiple instances of the WDM driver or to distinguish based on content.  That kind of functionality would effectively require JRiver to implement a mixer in their driver

Yes I thought that was the case, a quick Google says windows gives you nothing here either. I suppose the wdm driver won't know what the source app is either.

[mwillems]

Yes I thought that was the case, a quick Google says windows gives you nothing here either. I suppose the wdm driver won't know what the source app is either.

Windows definitely distinguishes between output sources in it's own mixer, you can easily see each application and its volume settings.  It just may not expose that to the drivers as it's happening in windows own mixer above the drive in the audio stack