Bluetooth audio in OSX Lion

This has also been a help for me. Thank you.

I can connect my Sony headset by:

1) having it in 'discoverable' mode

2) settings - edit serial ports - select headset - apply

3) use as adudio device

This will not work if I just have the headset switched on and try editing the serial ports.

I have Mac Book Pro, OS Lion.

Never had problems before i upgraded to Lion.

Hi Ken, yes I agree it is hard to found out what headset supports what; it can be quite frustrating. If you have spend up to 130 you might as well buy a stereo headset, which almost always support mono/input as well. Headsets that have worked well for me and are "modern" by all accounts are:

1) Creative WP-300 or 350... $65

2) Motorola S305 ... $35

3) Jaybird Sportsband ... $90

4) Sennhesier MM100 .. $150

5) MIIKEY Wireless Rhythm ... $90

if you want to really splurgs the Sennheiser PXC310 ($220) are really awesome

also, you should update to Mountain Lion if you can, audio works much better there (although doesn't resolve your issue with your current headsets, unfortunately).

make sure you buy them from Amazon or some place that will return them easy in case you run into any other snags.

anyway, YMMV, good luck!

Thanks for the great suggestions.

I’ll start investigating them.

I AM on ML just need to update my sig.

Thanks again ... Ken

Creative D100 Portable Wireless Speakers (also tried and same thing for D80 and D200)

Support Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR and still have the problems listed above 😟 please Apple give us a solution that does not involve buying something new.

Regards

Thank you so much for the post. My Sony DR-BT22 headphones work fantastically well in itunes I will try leaving itunes open and see if they work in other programs too. Faantastic I almost gave up using them ever again--just wwent from OS 10.6.8 to Lion 10.7.4

I bought a $20 Plantronics Explorer 240 ~ works like a dream ~ had to configure "Use as audio device" both in System Prefs Bluetooth and in the menu bar but so far it has been faultless...

The headset has good volume [not awesome audio quality of course] but it works!

Tony

Just picked up a Creative D200 bluetooth speaker, which Apple sells on their set, and the audio is constantly cutting out, choppy, and horrid. I'm running Mountain Lion on an early 2011 15" MBP. Both my Android ICS tablet (Asus Transformer) and phone (Samsung Galaxy S3) stream perfectly to the D200. My old white macbook from 2008 running Snow Leopard works fine with the speakers as well. This is nuts!

None of the solution in this thread have worked.

10.8.2 Mountain Lion on MacBookAir5,1 (Mid-2012)

I've tried Jawbones, I've tried Altec Lansings, I've tried Motorolas, I've tried Jabras. In short, every headset that works with every other Bluetooth audio device (including my iPhone and iPad) will not stay connected to Mac. I choos "Use As Audio Device", it tries and fails, until I re-pair.

I must re-pair every headset every time I want to use Bluetooth audio.

** Please Apple, fix! **

I'm also having bluetooth audio problems with Lion on my Macbook Pro, but I'm experiencing something I haven't seen mentioned here, and that is when I try to connect my Kinivo stereo headset, I have to go into Sound Preferences to make the connection work. When I do this, every minimized window in Finder opens up! Then I am unable to use the yellow minimize button on the Finder windows or double click on the title bar to minimize them. The only way to minimize them is to open the Window menu item for each of the open windows and select Minimize. I have no clue why bluetooth causes Finder to behave this bizarre way, but it happens consistently. Once I get the headset connected, iTunes plays through it without issues. If I turn the headset off or even pause it, the bluetooth connection is lost and I have to fiddle with it to reconnect.

I'm running OSX 10.7.5 (Lion) on my MacBook Pro. This seems to be another issue that Apple ignores so it can continue pushing users onto the "Cloud." Where you store your music would seem to be less important than whether you can listen to those files successfully.

I keep thinking: why is it so hard for Apple to fix the Bluetooth stack on OSX?

It cannot be the money, obviously!

It cannot be the specs – too many other vendors and, heck even FOSS, are doing it (granted, some better than others, but none this bad)

It cannot be the hardware – Apple has got 110% full control over hardware, no third-party add-on card vendor in the middle or anything

Apple, we are quite a few that would like to do like we do with our iPad's, our iPod's and our iPhone's – turn on a stereo headset, pair it with our Mac's, iMac's, MBP's and Air's, and listen to all that great music, we keep buying in the iTunes Store.

You got it working on the iOS – then why for crying out loud are you not able to do a "simple copy/paste" to OSX?

I made a mistake, I upgraded to Lion a year ago and yes my Bluetooth headset stopped working.

Yes Apple knows how to fix the problem, but wont do it, they want us to follow the trend of the ICloud and all the gadgets that we dont need to work and that the youngs use allday.

Apple wants that class of people to control their money and thats all they want.

Yes they have good gadgets but we dont need them to live a better life, but I need my computer for work and my headset to communicate with my customers.

Guy

Go to bluetooth icon click on the device name and a box will appear showing all devices then click on the device you want to remove and press the minus icon in the bottom left.

Hey there Ressac, thank you, these settings really helped me and the sound is a lot better, but when I put the write lines into the terminal I accidently added a space at one point when I was trying to change settings, you can see in my settings that "Apple Initial Bitpool" is in there twice. Once with 2 spaces after Bitpool, and once with only 1...

HsMacBook:LaunchAgents h$ defaults read com.apple.BluetoothAudioAgent{

"Apple Bitpool Max (editable)" = 70;

"Apple Bitpool Min (editable)" = 45;

"Apple Initial Bitpool (editable)" = 40;

"Apple Initial Bitpool (editable)" = 40;

"Negotiated Bitpool" = 45;

"Negotiated Bitpool Max" = 53;

"Negotiated Bitpool Min" = 45;

"Stream - Flush Ring on Packet Drop (editable)" = 0;

"Stream - Max Outstanding Packets (editable)" = 30;

"Stream Resume Delay" = "0.75";

}

This was my mistake and it feels messy, is there any way to get rid of that first line with the 2 spaces?

another command maybe that would clean it up? I don't have much experience in the Terminal.

Anybody is welcome to answer this if you can.

Thanks in advance!

This mucking around with the bitpool stuff never helped me. What did help was changing my wireless router band from 2.4ghz to 5ghz. Another thing that helps is turning wireless off entirely while running bluetooth. The second option is obviously no good. The first option is no good also, if you have wireless devices not compatible with the 5ghz band (or there is already lots of 5ghz interference).

I GUESS a lot of people like me are having bluetooth streaming issues because there's too much wireless interference. This is at least one advantage airplay speakers have over bluetooth ones.

Yet nonone of these problems in a 2.4ghz environment with iPhones, iPads, non-Apple computers, or running a previous Mac OS.