How to Stream Audio from Your Phone to Your Laptop

These days your primary means of listening to music if likely from an app on your phone. So how do you get the music from your phone to your laptop or desktop that has better speakers?

The answer is to use Bluetooth and PulseAudio. PulseAudio is the modern sound implementation on the Linux desktop. It runs as a sound server and takes sound inputs such a microphone or your browser playing a YouTube video and directs this sound to outputs such as your Laptop’s speakers.

PulseAudio can take the audio from a Bluetooth connection and route it to your laptop’s speakers and is very simple to get running.

First, install the PulseAudio Bluetooth modules. On ArchLinux this is called pulseaudio-bluetooth and on Ubuntu/Debian it is called pulseaudio-module-bluetooth.

After you have installed this package open the following file:

/etc/pulse/system.pa

And add the following couple of lines:

load-module module-bluetooth-policy
load-module module-bluetooth-discover

Then, as your regular user, restart PulseAudio:

$ pulseaudio -k
$ pulseaudio --start

And you’re all set!

All you need to do is to pair your phone and your computer and start playing something on your phone and it will play through your computer’s speakers.