Bluetooth software for dongle in Tiger

[juanstdio]

Hello everyone

I have my PB G4 12" as my music/video machine while I'm working, right now i'm using it with cord headphones, but when I try to use some bluetooth headset, the audio is chopped and with very low quality (assuming that because bluetooth 1.1)..

I connected a bluetooth dongle but it's not recognized by the bluetooth settings from Tiger, is there any software to configure a different bluetooth module to pair the headset and give it a try?

Thank you in advance!

 

[Idun098TZZ]

Hi,
not an expert but try to update the PB G4. Probably the device doesn't recognize the dongle or any other Bluetooth headset because they are too new are not supported anymore.
Cheers

 

[Doq]

Correct. Most Bluetooth headphones don't support the Bluetooth 1.1 hardware on most PowerBooks; and the ones that do are usually those in-ear one-ear headsets for making phone calls.

You may have better luck with 2005 PowerBooks, which include Bluetooth 2.0.

 

[netsrot39]

What Bluetooth dongle are we talking about here exactly? Modern Bluetooth dongles will work with Tiger for sure. How do I know that? Because I use a Bluetooh 4 dongle (LogiLink BT-0015) on Tiger on my Titanium PowerBook G4 1 GHz and it works great. No install is required, it indeed is plug and play and I think the enhanced reception is also utilized because it reports the correct Bluetooth version in System Profiler. A USB1 port could be limiting, I think (at least in my case since the TiBook only has USB1 ports). I can bypass the potential weaker signal by plugging the dongle into a USB2 PCMCIA card but none of that applies to a 12" PowerBook G4 since every model has Bluetooth by default.

Now in order to use the USB Bluetooth dongle you have to tell the OS by using something like "Bluetooth Explorer" which should be included with Xcode on the Tiger installation CDs / DVD. You could extract the application from there with another app called "Pacifist". There shouldn't be any need to install Xcode entirely.

There is also another option which is using the shell. Type

sudo nvram bluetoothHostControllerSwitchBehavior=always

and it SHOULD use the external Bluetooth model instead of the internal one. I stated that it SHOULD because I don't know if the command works with early OS X versions but I've had luck with modern ones.

The easiest option is of course to not have installed a Bluetooth module in the first place because OS X will use the only one available in the USB tree. Also note not any Bluetooth dongle will work since the chipset has to be compatible with OS X.