I frequently wear a pair of Bluetooth headphones paired to a computer. If I want to listen to something on my phone I have to re-pair the device to my phone.
Is it possible, through software or hardware, to have both my phone and computer connected in such a way that I can get audio output from either device to my headset simultaneously.
Yes, but you need "multipoint" headphones that are designed to do that. Low end headphones tend not to have that feature. Medium to high end often do, but make sure before you buy.
Sometimes there is a different pairing process to enable the multipoint. Look in the manual or google it for your particular headphones if it supports is it should tell you.
Appreciated.
Searching on Amazon for “noise canceling multipoint headphones” is kind of a crap shoot.
Some other searching is leading me to find there are multiple types of multipoint - simple, advanced and triple. The description for simple kind of hints at that not being what I want and advanced would be preferred at minimum.
This seems to be leading to “Microsoft Surface Headphones 2” as the best entry point(?)
Depends how much you want to spend. I wouldn't start the search with Amazon, take a gander at Head-fi.org forums.
Almost all proper headphones should support it, but it's worth verifying before purchase.
So you're better off shortlisting headphones you like, then narrowing by multipoint support, rather than only buying based on multipoint.I use Sennheiser BT-4.50, and they support multipoint. (Frequently available on their outlet store for good prices). I'm almost certain any of the recent Sony XM range will too.
Just as an fyi, If you're looking for fully wireless earbuds they're even harder to find with multipoint BT. This is due to the fact that they're already using it to connect to both the other bud and to the device, and at least at the time the bluetooth boards that were in production were pretty much only supporting 2 simultaneous connections. I believe more have been coming out, but when I checked a couple years ago Jabra was one of the few companies making them. Elite 75ts were what I got at the time. I really liked them, but a trip through the washing/drying machines took them out of service and I replaced them with something without the capability as I no longer needed it.
You need headphones with multipoint functionality. If your current pair can't connect to multiple sources at once already then you may need to buy new ones that can.
This might be possible if you can configure your computer as a bluetooth audio sink, link a second device to it, mix the audio, and then connect your headphones to the computer. Never tried or looked into doing this though. It will need some third party software to pull off if you are using Windows, or some manual configuration if you are using Linux.
It won't be convenient, but it can be done.
Appreciate a response that isn’t immediately throwing ~$300 at the problem. Wasn’t sure if this could be done with software or if there was some kind of DJ/musician hardware that would work. Will look into this more.
Others saying you need a multi-point feature but I thought it was just all devices with blue tooth 5.
I've had several headphones that do this but implementation seems buggy in all of them. I'm forever turning everything off and on, re-pairing, et cetera.
You don't have to re-pair. Just leave Bluetooth running on both your phone and PC, and your headphones will automatically connect to whatever device is playing audio. It's that simple. I do it all the time.
That only works if the Bluetooth device is able to connect to two or more devices at the same time. My headset doesn't, so if I want to switch sources, I need to explicitly disconnect the headset from the phone and manually connect it from the PC (in both cases, open Bluetooth settings, click on theb headset that's paired and click either connect or disconnect). It's a bit of effort but not too bad. Not as bad as pairing though.
If I don't disconnect from the last connected device, my headset will automatically connect to it and only play media from it.
Don't mean to be rude, but kind of ancientass headphones don't support pairing with multiple devices at a time? What year is it? 2003?
My headphones can pair with a lot of devices. It can actively play media from only one source at a time, though. The ability for headsets to play sound from two sources at the same time is still pretty rare. And I'm not even sure playing from 3 sources exists.
