Article / 14th Sep 2007

Fun with Linux and A2DP

My headphones broke last Tuesday, and so I naturally went to buy some more. However, my eye caught this post, and since I actually had some spare cash just begging to be used, I decided to go ahead and buy some Jabra BT620s headphones.

They arrived the following day, and so I followed the instructions and got them working under Maemo using Kagu as the blog posting describes. Performance is only OK; there is skipping once or twice, and if you even tempt Kagu's interface into moving expect lots of blank sound.

This is, I imagine, mostly because Kagu has an effects-heavy PyGame interface. It's fine when all the music playing is offloaded to the DSP chip, but a2dp requires a daemon so sit and transcode all the data in realtime.

I may attempt to write a more CPU-friendly GUI to the Kagu libraries, like I was planning to convert Spindle into anyway; we'll see. For the moment, though, I'm quite happy with the playback overall.