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by davexunit 3248 days ago
Just yesterday I used an old raspberry pi to make a bluetooth audio receiver that could be integrated with my vintage stereo equipment. You can buy something off the shelf for around $25 but they use cheap digital-to-analog converters and I wanted to use the high quality USB DAC I already had. Total hardware needed was the Pi, powered USB hub, USB DAC, and USB bluetooth adapter.

Potato quality photo of the very advanced system I came up with for keeping all the components together: https://tootcatapril2017.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/media_at...

1 comments

Did you have to use the USB bluetooth adapter with a Pi 3? I know the 3 has bluetooth but I don't know enough about it to know if I can just connect my phone to it to play music. I want to do something very similar to what you've done so I'm excited to see that somebody else succeeded.
I used the very first version of the Raspberry Pi model B. I bought one when they became available years ago and then never did anything with it. If the Pi 3 comes with a bluetooth chip built-in then you will just need to do some software configuration. There are three servers to configure: bluez, udev, and pulseaudio. I used the following gist as a guide, but didn't follow every step exactly:

https://gist.github.com/oleq/24e09112b07464acbda1

Hope this helps!

I did the same thing using a HifiBerry-Hat (used the Pi as a Mopidy server before, but I like the Bluetooth setup better for UI reasons).

If you're using BlueZ and Pulseaudio, it comes down to a couple of simple config entries (google for Linux Bluetooth A2DP Sink).

I used a RPi 2 with a USB Dongle for the Bluetooth though, so I can't vouch for the internal Bluetooth of the RPi 3.