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Strange question, so bear with me. I have a bluetooth device (an Android smartphone, specifically), on which I have a lot of music. I'm wondering if there's a way to pair up the device and my Mac (which has bluetooth hardware built-in) in a way that the computer acts as a bluetooth headset?

To put it another way, I want to play music via the media player on my phone, and have the music, over bluetooth, come through the computer's speakers. Like I said, I have a lot of music on my phone and don't want to copy it all to my work computer.

Alternatively if there's no way to do this through OSX, can it be done through Linux?

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3 Answers 3

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You can use ObexFS to mount the device, then play the music from the mount point

I'm not sure if Mac OSX supports fuse, however I use this on Linux all the time with different phones.

You can use hcitool inq (from Bluez) to find your phone's bluetooth address.

mount -t fuse "obexfs#-bPHONE_BT_ADDRESS -B6" /media/phone

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AFAIK, no, its not possible on OS X (out of the box).

Depending on the model of machine, you may have a Line-in you could use to feed audio from the phone through the Mac, but save for having a client/server app setup, I don’t think its possible.

Another option, if the android can act as a dumb USB disk, plug it in via USB, hold Alt when starting iTunes, and create an iTunes library on the phone. All metadata, etc would be stored and kept on the phone, once you shut down iTunes and remove the phone the machine loses all knowledge of it (short of a line in your iTunes preferences plist pointing at that drive).

Every subsequent time you start iTunes it will look there first, then prompt if it can’t find the storage on your phone.

I used to maintain my iTunes library on my work machine this way, using an external USB disk instead of a phone, but its the same principle.

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  • The problem with the line-in idea is, it'd be nice to be able to control the music (pause, next track, etc) with the computer's media keys like a bluetooth headset can do. The problem with the itunes over usb idea is that I already have several playlists on the device and I'd like to use them, rather than recreate them in itunes.
    – EvanK
    Commented Nov 19, 2010 at 19:17
  • 2
    You’re likely up a river of excrement on an indian water vessel without any method of propulsion then.
    – peelman
    Commented Nov 20, 2010 at 16:10
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Vysor for Android to Mac audio

Vysor works by enabling Chromecast to 'cast' the device's audio and video from the Android device to the Mac. The setup works so far. I've tested this as a proof-of-concept. More testing is needed for the reliability of the connection over a long period of time.

Setup

  1. Vysor overflow menu > Toggle Audio

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  1. Select Vysor Audio Output > Accept warning by selecting Start now.

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