Bluetooth music reception?
#1
I bought a used iPhone 3GS some time ago, pretty much exclusively so that I'd have a device that could hold all of my music, and that I could use in the car. But I just now realized that it can beam my tunes out to any nearby bluetooth enabled receiver, so I got the swell idea to see if I could use it to beam my tunes via bluetooth into my HTPC which is, of course, wired up to my living room A/V receiver. Now I just need some advice on what I should be purchasing in order to do this, and also what configuration steps I might need to take on the HTPC side in order to make this all work.

My HTPC is a Foxconn nt-A3700, current with -no- internal drive at all, and I'm running OpenELEC live on it (loaded from a USB stick).

So the questions are:

How can I determine, unambiguously, whether or not my HTPC already has a built-in bluetooth receiver. Is there a nice free utility program floating around someplace that does like a hardware inventory and that will give me the straight scoop on the possibility of a built-in bluetooth receiver? (The online specs for my specific HTPC machine don't say anything about it having bluetooth, but I know that my laptop has built-in bluetooth, and I know that bluetooth is commonly included on mini PCIe wireless cards... which I do believe the Foxconn contains... so, you know, who knows? Hope springs eternal!)

Assuming that my HTPC _doesn't_ already have a built-in bluetooth receiver, what kind should I purchase? Any recommendations? I got lots of unused USB ports on the HTPC.

Once I get all the hardware in place, will XBMC support reception of bluetooth-beamed audio from the iPhone 3GS? Will OpenELEC? If so, what knobs and dials to I need to twist in order to make them do that?

P.S. Pardonnez-moi if answers to all of the above are contained in a FAQ someplace (which I probably should have searched for before posting).
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#2
While it might be possible to do, it would be a lot easier to just turn AirPlay receiving on in XBMC and then use AirPlay to play music to your HTPC. Even an iPhone 3Gs can do AirPlay for music, as long as it's on the same wifi network. The quality of the music will be better than bluetooth, as well.
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#3
Thank you Ned. I am looking into this now. I knew that the 3GS had Wi-Fi, but I never really knew (till now) that this might be a way to transmit & playback stored music files from the phone to some other device.

Meanwhile, later that same lifetime...

Whew! In the immortal words of Jerry Garcia "What a long, strange trip it's been."

I knew nothing about Airplay, so I had to google and read up on it, you know, just to get started. (and I also found the need to recover my long lost Apple App Store password along the way.) Now I have AirPlay successfully running and I'm beaming music from my #2 office PC (containing my Windoze+iTunes) out to my living room HTPC. So that part, at least, is all good. HOWEVER, I gather that the general idea here is that actually, it is my office PC that is doing the playing (and transmitting over my local net to the HTPC) and that the last piece of this puzzle is to have my iPhone 3GS just act like a remote control sort of thing for the running instance of iTunes that is over on the PC.

This is where things have gone south, and now seem impossible. According to what I read about all this on the about.com web site, the way to do this is to simply download Apple's free "Remote" app into my 3GS. My attempt to do this failed utterly, however I did get a user-friendly and helpful message on the 3GS explaining exactly why. Apparently, this app needs iOS 7.x or higher to run. The 3GS will only run iOS up through the 6.x series. So it looks like I am back to square one. Older and more knowledgeable perhaps, but still not where I had hoped to be. I still can't sit (like a vegetable?) on my couch and clickety-clack on my 3GS and make music play out of my HTPC+A/V Receiver setup.

Anyway, who ever said that I wanted to have to turn on my #2 office PC, just in order to listen to music in the living room anyway? I'd prefer not to have to do that. (Energy conscious, ya know.)

So, um, as I was saying... how can I beam music _directly_ out of the 3GS itself, via bluetooth or whatever, and straight into my HTPC (which is running XBMC/OpenELEC, of course)? It still seems like this ought to be do-able with bluetooth. If the audio quality isn't 100%, I'll live with it, and probably will never even notice the difference. I just want to see this work, if possible.
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#4
No, you can AirPlay directly from the iPhone to XBMC and not involve the additional PC.
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#5
Ummm... wow! Yea. Apparently so.

The instructions I read told me that I needed to look for the little AirPlay empty rectangle with solid triangle icon. I didn't see that where people said it should be on the iPhone, so then I assumed they meant I should look for it on iTunes on the PC. And then I got to fiddling the XBMC settings and sure enough, there the icon was on iTunes on the PC. I didn't think to look back and see if I had it (the AirPlay icon) also now on the iPhone. But sure as sh*t, there it is now! And it's working great with XBMC & my HTPC & my A/V Receiver. Thanks again Ned! Really. Thanks a lot. This is sooooo cool. I can now dazzle my friends and intimidate my enemies! :-)

Just one question. The audio isn't 100% perfect. There's some intermittent crackling. If it were you, what things would you look at and it what order, you know, in order to try to eliminate the intermittent crackle? I'm sure that I'm located in a pretty noisy environment, as far as 2.4GHz is concerned, so there's that. But the phone is no more than 15 feet from my Linksys E2000, which in turn is no more than 25 feet from the HTPC. I have a dual band USB Wi-Fi thingy that I could easily connect up to make the HTPC speak 5GHz to the Linksys, but the iPhone would still be speaking to the Linksys on the 2.4GHz band, which is all it (the iPhone) is capable of, I assume.

P.S. The cracking comes and goes, but it now appears to me that this may indeed be a sign of packets getting dropped/lost over the Wi-Fi. At one point during playback, the silences started to widen, until they lasted several seconds, and then things devolved even more from there, to the point where there were silences lasting over 30 seconds.

May I safely assume that AirPlay is based on transmission over UDP rather than TCP? If not, then I wonder what could be causing what certainly sounded to me like a whole lot of drop-outs in the streaming.
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