Page 1 of 1

Bluetooth devices in MacOS are deactivated during upload

Posted: 27 Dec 2010, 04:37
by sbj
Hi,

When I upload music or movies to my new B3 my bluetooth keyboard and mouse get deactivated.

It is no great problem when I upload a handful of songs. Then I just see a message from MacOS telling me that my keyboard has been deactivated followed by a message that it is again activated when the upload completes.

But when I upload a larger amount of data such as a 1 GB video my bluetooth mouse also gets deactivated and I have to activate it manually. After such an incident mouse operations are sluggish so I usually restart the Mac to get everything back in working order.

My system is a MacBook Air running the latest release of MacOS and a 2 TB B3 running the latest SW.

/Søren

Re: Bluetooth devices in MacOS are deactivated during upload

Posted: 28 Dec 2010, 13:51
by Cheeseboy
Hi Søren,

I have a Bose Soundlink portable speaker that I use to play music via Bluetooth from my HTC Android phone.
The speaker came with a dongle which was supposed to connect the speaker to my computer.
The documentation did not mention that the protocol used by the device was actually Bluetooth, but I read about this undocumented feature, and I had to buy it for an absolutely silly amount of money, because there was nothing else that could do it at the time.

OK, having said all that:
- If I use the included Bose dongle, it works fine, unless I have WiFi traffic in the air nearby. This is not just me having this problem, I have read about many others on the web.

- If I use my phone's Bluetooth connection directly to the speaker (undocumented), it works without disturbance from WiFi.

- If I use a 20 dollar generic USB Bluetooth dongle to connect to the speaker from my PC (again undocumented), it works just fine.

Conclusion (confirmed in my case, and I suspect in yours):
The Bluetooth tech shipped by companies that charges outrageously for their products, but specializes in other stuff, is crap.

Suggestions:
1) Set up your WiFi settings to use a different channel (change from Automatic to a specific channel, and if it still fails, try all the other channels one by one).

2) Disable the built-in Bluetooth device in your MacBook Air, and by a cheap Bluetooth USB device and see if it makes a difference. If it does, claim your money back from Apple (or at least report the problem).

Cheers!

Cheeseboy

-----------------
[Picture removed]

Re: Bluetooth devices in MacOS are deactivated during upload

Posted: 29 Dec 2010, 04:58
by sbj
Hi,

Thanks a lot for your reply and suggestions.

I will try them and post the results here.

/Søren