Nokia BH-501 and Windows XP Bluetooth A2DP playback

10 May 2007

I had a sudden compulsion to make my BH-501 work at last with Windows after one too many late-night “I can’t use speakers and can no longer abide cables for crappy earphones” moments. If I had money enough to blow $200 on a decent set of headphones expressly for the purpose of sitting at the PC late at night, sure, but I don’t at the minute. So my mobile’s Bluetooth headphones do a decent job in the time being.

The magical secret, it seems, is Bluesoleil’s free EDR Bluetooth manager software that allegedly has a 20MB data transfer limitation per session until it’s purchased, but I’ve just downloaded it and done over 50MB of audio data transfers in A2DP streams and it’s not complaining. Plus, Buy/Register under the Help menu are greyed out… so I don’t know quite how serious they are about selling this thing.

At any rate, it’s working great for me, though my crappy Bluetooth dongle slows EVERYTHING about this computer down… must try another one, it’s not A2DP’s fault because whenever I pair my mobile with it to sync the same thing happens — even when nothing’s paired, as soon as you plug the dongle in (USB) everything starts crawling.

All that said, BlueSoleil are great. Works well.