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audiobluetoothraspberry-pi3pulseaudio

Connect Multiple Bluetooth Speakers with Raspberry Pi


I'm trying to connect several bluetooth devices with Raspberry PI to use them as speakers.

I'm using RetroPie as a distribution, because of the tests I've done it's the only one that matches and allows continuous synchronization with several bluetooth devices at the same time.

However, the system only detects the first device that connects as a sound card, the rest keep the bluetooth synchronization active, but it does not interpret them as audio cards even though it is indicated by blueman-manager.

Is there anything I can do to keep all devices synchronized and supported as audio cards?


Solution

  • Palm, even so this a old post, it is not yet closed. As I just got the same issue, here my answer. What you try to do is to connect mutliple audio sreaming services (Speakers) to 1 audio bluetooth source, that is not possible like this. Therefore your PC only connects to the first box. You could try multiple bluetooth dongles, but then you run into the timing issue with audio stream syncronization between the boxes. The only solution is to use Bluetooth 4.1 upwards master-slave services. Therefore the Speakers need to be connected to each other and seen as 1 device from the PC. In that mode the stream is skewed to ensure syncronous playing. Many new Bluetooth speakers support this mode. Hope that helped.