Is there any way to make Windows 10 act as a A2DP sink?

Question

Windows 10 has a Bluetooth Stack included and recognizes most Bluetooth Sticks without any problems. However, while Windows does support A2DP, it does not act as a sink and therefore, you cannot e.g. stream Audio from Android to the Computer, which is what I want.

The manufacturer of my BT Stick does not provide any Windows 10 Drivers, since Microsoft does this. I tried the older software, which can act as A2DP sink, but it has a memory leak that crashes my PC after longer sessions of listening to music, which is basically every day (I listen to music while programming/working). (Basically I can watch the non-pooled Kernel memory go up by the second when listening to music and can make it stop by stopping the music)

So my question is, is there any alternative, universal driver I can use that can act as said sink to receive Audio from my Phone on my PC?

Answer 1

It seems like Microsoft has disabled A2DP sink capabilities since Window 8, or it just doesn't work anymore.

You could try to download and update the audio driver with software supplied by the manufacturer of your Bluetooth card/chip.

If that doesn't help, you could replace the Microsoft Bluetooth Stack with a third-party product, such as :

• BlueSoleil Bluetooth Stack ($27.99)
• Toshiba Bluetooth Stack (for the right hardware)
• WIDCOMM/Broadcom Bluetooth Software (for the right hardware)

[EDIT]

To summarize our discussion below:

• The Broadcom drivers have the A2DP sink but suffer from a serious memory leak (which has been the case for the last decade), while
• Microsoft's A2DP sink capabilities are not functional.

So the only options I can think of are:

1. Try BlueSoleil and buy if it fixes the problem and the free version is too restrictive.

2. Disable/enable your network adapter whenever a slow-down occurs, in the hope that this will reinitialize the memory. This can be done via a script run as admin:
   netsh interface set interface "network adapter name" admin=disable
netsh interface set interface "network adapter name" admin=enable

3. Replace your network adapter with a non-Broadcom card.

Answer 2

Sure, not for everybody, but usable:

4. Use Linux in VirtualBox and capture bluetooth device. I have Kubuntu 16.04 as a guest on Win 10 and Intel BT and this setup works. (Or use old Win 7 as guest. It had this A2DP sink feature. But not tested by me. I used Kubuntu, because I use it at work on Win host.) It worked "automagically" after pairing in "System settings - Bluetooth".

Answer 3

I had this problem with a £3.50 ebay dongle, for which I had lost the driver CD. As stated by others, Windows 10 default drivers don't support A2DP sink mode.

The CSR 4.0 bluetooth Harmony software stack solved it for me.

Answer 4

If you have Broadcom Bluetooth Chipset, such as BCM20702, you can try the BTW stack from Broadcom: https://www.iogear.com/support/dm/driver/GBU421 (ver. 12.0.0.9980). I'm guessing it implements entire or the most part of the BT stack with its own kernel drivers. Later drivers (ver. 12.0.1+) seems to utilize the windows BT stack and does not ship it's own kernel drivers (Only a very small helper kernel driver is loaded, presumably in charge of firmware loading).

I have success with iPhone 5c+BCM20702+Windows 10 x64 1809, where both A2DP and AVRCP works (There'll be a popup window showing which song is playing with other control buttons). You can even use your computer keyboard as the input device for your smart phone.

FYI: Device needs to be repaired after the driver is installed, you have to "forget" your computer from iOS settings to start the authentication process again.