My ongoing efforts to eliminate wires from my desk (I'll just about accept that I have to have a power lead running into the back of my laptop but I want no more than that) led me to buy a set of Acoustic Energy bluetooth speakers to replace my rather old and ailing set. Much like my adventures with openSUSE 10.3 on a Samsung R60plus, this has good and not-so-good aspects.

Now, I'm not daft and I'd checked the BlueZ wiki on audio devices to ensure that it should be possible. The AE speakers support A2DP and so I figured I'd be in business. I was right. To a point.

First, the good news. I followed the guidelines on the Wiki for setting Banshee. I use Banshee for all my listening needs as Helix Banshee allows me to listen to BBC Radio on the RealAudio streams (as an aside, my life would be a lot easier if the BBC would do the Right Thing^TM and start streaming in MP3 or - even better - Ogg Vorbis like Virgin Radio do). This worked perfectly - I enabled the Audio Service in the GNOME bluetooth applet, edited .asoundrc, started Banshee and hit play. A notification popped up inviting me to bond with the speakers and, once I'd done so, the White Stripes came blasting out of the speakers which I hastily turned down (wow, a lot of power). Success.

Now, the not-so-good news. RealPlayer is not listed as a supported player on the Wiki but I had reckoned without Banshee not playing RealAudio streams through the GStreamer plugin. I suppose it should have occurred to me but it simply hadn't. So, if I'm listening to a radio stream I have to either listen through the internal speaker in my laptop or plug into the speakers' mini-jack input (or hope that the BBC do indeed at some point sort out their streaming and not require people to use a proprietary codec). The other not-so-good news is that my bluetooth mouse interferes with the audio so it gets choppy and slows down if I'm using my mouse.

Still, all that is put into perspective by the fact that, other than actually bonding to the speakers, I couldn't use them at all in Windows.