Remote Audio / Playing your Music anywhere: An ongoing article for help adding this functionality.

This article is about using your android phone or tablet as a music remote control.  I"m writing this article because as I was trying to figure out how to get my Acer A500 tablet to play it's audio over my computer speakers, I found a lot of people asking in forums across different websites how they can use their tablet or phone as the control for playing their music and have the audio come out their home stereo speakers.

Apparently a lot of people, like me :P, have this gluttonously lazy romantic fantasy of sitting on their $3000 leather couch by the fireplace, sipping a glass of wine and using their tablet as a media remote to play what amuses them while they sit and laugh with their friends.  Ha ha ...well you can do that!

Widcomm bluetooth drivers with A2DP support is the key.
Click read more to see the rest of the article....



How you ask?  Well bluetooth is the answer.
If you don't have a least a basic knowledge of pairing bluetooth devices, google it and find out how.

My setup:
HP dv7 laptop connected thru HDMI to 5.1 theater, then connect from there to my 46" Sony Bravia.
My devices are a Motorola Droid X and an Acer Iconia A500.

What happened for me:  I paired my computer and device and ended up with it saying, "paired, but not connected".  And that's all I could get.

How I fixed it:  The key, I found was to download a new bluetooth driver that included a2dp support.  a2dp and widcomm / broadcomm is the key.  After installing the driver, that sound your hear when you plug in a new device on your computer started dinging like a slot machine and it recognized about 15 new bluetooth devices.

After that, all of my tablets audio comes out my computer speakers (and it works on my phone as well)

I'd love to give you the link, but ha ha I forget where I downloaded it.  So I went to the broadcom website and tried to download and install the driver from there and the program said it wouldn't update on my computer.  So if anyone knows why? I'd appreciate you letting me know.

So I guess the best advice I can give you is google a2dp, widcomm, drivers and find a driver download that way.  If I get better info, or find a link in the meantime, I'll update this article to be a more professional step-by-step how-to.

So, to summarize what you need:

• Stereo or Home Theater System (either hooked up to your computer the way I have it or if nearby, run an audio cable out your headphone jack (or audio out if you have it) to the stereo's audio in.)
• Windows computer with intregrated bluetooth or a bluetooth dongle with the most current drivers including a2dp support.  (if your computer and stereo is separate, you can also go buy a bluetooth a2dp device that direct connects your android device, I wouldn't recommend this though, if you haven't interconnected your computer, tv, home theatre system yet, it's 2012 man, it's time.
• Android Tablet or Phone
• Google Music  Google music is the simplest answer.  You can uploaded up to 20,000 song files to your account for free. From your google music account, you can play those songs from any web brower or use the app on an android device.  Note on Google Music:  For those not familiar, its really easy to setup, download the program, point it to the directory where your music is stored and it uploads your entire library in the background.  Also, you can set it to check the folder for new music, so you only have to add music to one place and it will be available on any computer, or any device.    

What you'll ultimately be able to do with the widcomm drivers:  

• Play all audio from your tablet over your computer speakers.  The native windows sound mixer works great, I play netflix on my computer and mix in the sound effect from a game I'm playing on my tablet while I watch TV.  (Note Music works perfect, but I did notice some very slight lag if you play video on your tablet and pipe it through bluetooth.  The lag got better since the first day I installed (maybe I've restarted both devices since then), So playing music is perfect, playing games is good, watching a movie can give some very slight lag, the lip movements are maybe one eighth of a second of when someone speaks, but for most casual usage it doesn't really annoy me much since if I want high quality I play it out my window7 computer.) 
• Play all audio from your phone over your computer speakers as well (and doesn't affect phone calls)  A nice bonus for this, I got a phone call while I was testing it out.  When the phone call came in, it muted the music and brought both the audio and mic back to handset for the call, I was really pleased it automatically did what I wanted and didn't try and pipe the phone call audio through my home theatre speakers.  
• The tablet options for bluetooth are still a bit sparse, but you have many options for bluetooth use with the updated drivers for a handset. Use to connect to the internet, make a phone call, listen to audio, use the computer as a speakerphone/handset, send files.  

Hopefully if you have a newer computer, you shouldn't even need to bother with all this, the newer bluetooth drivers will be included.  But then, my computer really isn't that old, just over two years.  My theory is windows simply doesn't like bluetooth.  I've found in the past if windows doesn't own it or like it then support for that device in windows is strangely lacking.  A good example is several years ago when I had an old Windows Phone, it connected great, but for some reason I couldn't get my old Palm Pilot to connect to vista, only XP.  

As with many of the articles on this site, they are never quite finished.  I used this site as an ongoing journal to note things I've spent hours discovering, so that others don't have to.