Sunday, October 28, 2007

How to hear your GPS software through your Bluetooth hands-free carkit

I will elaborate on this post with more details in the future.

But, in a nutshell, my first GPS solution was running CoPilot on my MPX-220 Smartphone. Motorola had a cool "wired" hands-free car kit that worked VERY well and I got for only $20. What's cool about this car-kit was that all I had to do was connect one wire to the bottom of the MPX-220 and it would not only charge the phone while in my car, but all audio coming from the phone would be routed to the car-kit's 3-watt external speaker. I mean *ALL* audio, not just when I was talking on a phone call. This was cool because every time Copilot would announce a verbal direction, I heard it super easy and clear vie the 3-watt speaker, and not from the tiny built-in speaker of the phone.

But, then I got a new Dash Smartphone. Since there were no "wired" car-kits for the dash, I knew I would need to get a bluetooth hands free car-kit. But, I realized from past experience that sound only comes out of bluetooth devices during an actual phone call, and all other audio sounds (like prompt sound noises that an application plays when asking you for input) only come out of the built-in speaker.

Then, I found the solution, BTAudio. It's a small freeware app that when run, will redirect *ALL* audio that is generated from the phone to any attached bluetooth device.

Some issues:
1) The audio redirecting gets turned off (requiring you to rerun the utility) after each phone call or when certain apps that also redirect are run (i.e. Microsoft's Voice Command).
2) Some phones implement their own bluetooth "stack" and don't use Microsoft's bluetooth stack. These "custom stack" phones may not allow BTAudio to redirect the audio. This issue is apparently known by Microsoft and is even mentioned in the "Release Notes" for their Voice Command product, because it too will try to send the TTS voice (to announce an incoming call or received email) to a bluetooth device if one if available.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Hi John, great information. I am wondering if you would consider spending a few moments with me either by phone or e-mail about the MPX 220. I have had it, or rather five of them since they seem to fail, for a couple of years and have been most unhappy with the fact that neither my carrier nor motorola have been able to address my issues and the former has in fact cost me considerable time and money when I tried repeatedly to utilize that route. And unfortunately, I am a neophyte which only confounds the issue. I think you could help me in five minutes, in return I would be happy to do something for you such as a press release or something related to my field. I appreciate your considering. I understand you are busy. my e is writingtheworld@gmail.com. Many thanks John!

Anonymous said...

I use my BT to listen to audio (Audible.com) books on my Dash. Mostly when sitting around waiting on something....sometimes while driving...shhhh! :-)

John Cody said...

Hi prgirl,

What exactly (the more details the better) is the issue you have?