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I have a project idea which involves a bluetooth dongle that has to accept audio input streams from two different devices at the same time. I don't know if that's possible, so would it be possible to have a "slave" and "master" setup where if the "master" is playing audio then that "slave" input is silenced?

2 Answers 2

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Theoretically, yes. There's no reason why 1 or more things cannot be paired.

Remember though the bandwidth more than halves (obvious) and will be degraded if they're sending audio at the same time quite severely. I wouldn't recommend it in practice

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  • It not possible to stream audio from two separate devices to one Bluetooth master. Its not a bandwidth problem just a protocol restriction. Please consider checking technicalities before posting untested answers.
    – Piotr Kula
    Sep 2, 2015 at 18:36
  • @ppumkin there's no technical reason why not, and looking at the source code for the driver there is no implementation reason as to why not. I can look into doing it virtually, that's as near as I can get.
    – Alec Teal
    Sep 2, 2015 at 20:00
  • It will require low level Bluetooth control though.. not something that any SDK offers out of the box.
    – Piotr Kula
    Sep 2, 2015 at 20:01
  • @ppumkin there's no technical reason why you couldn't. The limitation is bandwidth only, as I said. If there is sufficient bandwidth for the data but the protocol takes too long to switch devices a bigger buffer could be used. As I said in my answer, there's no technical limitation.
    – Alec Teal
    Sep 2, 2015 at 20:02
  • @ppumkin I consider drivers I can modify as 'out of the box' BTW. I smell a windows user :P
    – Alec Teal
    Sep 2, 2015 at 20:03
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You can pair a master to 7 slaves in one piconet, but in a time interval a master is only connected to one slave. So actually you can not accept input streams at same time. But since Bluetooth does frequeny hopping very very fast, with a proper setting it can accept from one then accept from other then other again, but I don't know if it would be efficient in terms of quality since some of the data might be neglected.

Some sources : Bluetooth Essentials for Programmers , How Bluetooth works

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    This is correct. Only one stream at a time. You can however stream from one device to two Bluetooth slaves "stereo" function but requires allot of code work.
    – Piotr Kula
    Sep 2, 2015 at 18:37

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