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I am new to PulseAudio and ALSA, so please go easy on me. This might seem like a dumb question, but it is quite important to have it answered.

I am developing application on ARM imx6 board (lets call it BOARD1), with built-in sound card support. With ALSA, I am able to play audio throgh Headset_OUT. But now, we want to move to a new board (lets call it BOARD2), which does not have built in soundcard. But the idea is to connect a bluetooth module to the BOARD2 and have the audio streamed to the bluetooth speaker.

My question is, is it possible to use PULSEAUDIO to send/receive audio to external (bluetooth) audio device without local embedded soundcard (i.e. is it possible to do audio encoding/decoding in just software with pulseaudio and gstreamer combination) ?

Regards

pavanpadawan
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  • no experience with bluetooth, but you could also stream the audio via rtp or similar protocol if you have network accessible from that board 2.. but I dont know your use case.. – nayana May 16 '16 at 09:46
  • @otopolsky The board will be connected to network for audio/video communication. Audio streaming will be bidirectional. From what I understand, a soundcard is needed when you want to play audio on the board. Since the board will be connected to bluetooth speaker, it doesn't have to play natively. The question I want answered is, whether it is possible to send the audio to bluetooth speaker and can the bluetooth speaker play the audio, without a native soundcard ? If we imagine PC scenario, is it possible to play audio on the bluetooth speaker without soundcard on PC ? – pavanpadawan May 17 '16 at 13:28
  • I dont have much experience with playing sound on dedicated speakers but.. soundcard takes just the raw PCM samples and translates them to analog sound.. but you can take those PCM samples and do with them whatever you want.. you can bundle them to RTP stream stream via bluetooth so IMHO I think you dont need audio card for these kind of things.. well the bluetooth speaker must have something which converts the PCM into sound so I guess there is at least some coder or what is it called inside.. – nayana May 18 '16 at 06:36

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