Stream music from your phone to Fedora Workstation

Have you ever had an awesome song on your phone, and want to listen to it on your desktop without moving the file over? Or want to easily listen to your preferred streaming music service easily on your computer? Fedora Workstation has a neat little feature that allows you to easily stream music from your phone via bluetooth, and it is a breeze to get working.

I tried it out on a Fedora 22 Workstation fresh install (on a laptop with a bluetooth adapter), and a Nexus 5 mobile phone running Android 5.1.1.

All you need to do is pair your phone with your Fedora 22 workstation, and then ensure that sending audio is enabled on your phone. Now, when you start playing audio on your phone, the sound will be coming from the speakers or headphones attached to your Fedora Workstation machine, rather than your phone. I tested this out with the built-in music app on Android 5 “Lollipop”, and the Spotify app, and it all worked excellently. One thing I did notice, however, was that the playback was cutting in and out — but that was fixed by closing the bluetooth settings dialog.

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20 Comments

  1. Sumit Bhardwaj

    Works perfectly well with my Thinkpad X240 and Moto G 2014 ๐Ÿ™‚

  2. Greg

    By the way it works fine too between Fedora and my central music audio system, in my case a Sony music system With bluetooth. So i listen my music from F22 rhythmbox collection With bluetooth to my Sony centre!

  3. Zoltan Hoppar

    Works well with Dell Latitude 4310 and HTC Desire 310. It has similarly some caching issues, I try with CBR mp3’s too. But Android is 4.2.2.

  4. Darryl Pierce

    Worked perfectly for me with my iPhone 5 on a Thinkpad T530 and F22! Thanks for bringing this ability up!

  5. Matthew Booth

    Very nice! If it hooked up the media keys too, that would be the icing on the cake.

    • Yeah, I dug around to see if there was a way to get this working. Either by an application in Fedora or some other means, but could not find anything.

      It would also be a neat feature if the receiving end (in this case the Fedora Workstation machine could also display the track name)

  6. Samuel Toogood

    Can confirm also works on iphone (4, but I imagine others too). Appears in airplay options once paired over bluetooth.

  7. Ashwin Date

    Thanks for this! Works perfectly nice ๐Ÿ™‚ Now I can move my entire songs collection to the phone. w00t!

    HP Pavilion + Moto X

  8. Jason

    I’ve done this for years with a tiny BlueTooth USB dongle on PC, but mainly to get game audio to my headphones, and not for music where quality matters.

    It’s a shame that the leading lossless BlueTooth codec — APTX — is proprietary.

  9. I use bluetooth to stream audio to my surround sound receiver. After initial pairing, you can simply switch on the bluetooth connection; the computer automatically changes output to the right device, and the receiver automatically changes input to bluetooth. Super easy and effective with Fedora Workstation, great for sharing music from the laptop.

  10. Onuralp SEZER

    I did same method with old fedora version also using used android 4.0 and upper version too. It’s working always pretty much fine for music sharing phone ringing,messaging. We can get all sort of stuff sound ๐Ÿ™‚

  11. Michal

    Works also with Samsung Galaxy mini 2 with android 2.3.6

  12. arielnmz

    Works perfectly with my Fedora 21 XFCE Spin paired with my Moto X via bluedevil (Y)

  13. Luya Tshimbalanga

    Good to see this article as I already streamed my Android Jelly Bean Phone since Fedora 20 using Bluetooth. It also show Pulseaudio ability as well by recognizing the microphone from the Bluetooth connected. Some works need to be done like Volume, Audio title. Kudos goes to Pulseaudio team.

  14. Victor

    Works flawlessly with Nexus 4.
    Thanks!

  15. work’s pefectly with Sony Music App (9.0.1.A.3)
    Good Work!

  16. Hรฉctor Yaque

    It works with my iphone 4s on fedora 22, but I can’t control the volume level from the iphone, somebody can help me to resolve this problem.

  17. Be

    Please note that Bluetooth audio uses lossy compression which reduces the quality of audio. If you care about audio quality, do not use Bluetooth audio.

  18. Dan

    Much more interesting is streaming your audio to a network speaker, like the Apple AirPlay ones. That pulseaudio plugin has pretty much broken since months.

  19. Pushkraj

    Worked perfectly on my Dell Latitude 3540 and MI4i.

    Thanks a lot.

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