HACKER Q&A
📣 jauntywundrkind

Anyone Waiting on BT Auracast?


Hey folks. Anyone out there waiting for BT Auracast? It was announced June 2022, and immediately struck me as must have.

I lost my earbuds, but it seems ridiculous to get a replacement without Auracast, seems like surely if I'm going to make a decent sized purchase like that it needs to support group playing. I want to tune into the radios of other people on the metro or on the bus, want to be able to watch a movie on the plane with someone.

Having been announced so far back now, I've been struggling with expectations. I keep assuming this has to be happening someday soon! I'm really hoping the product announcement season that's right around the corner had a good number of Auracast announcements. Has anyone else been struggling with expectations here?

Side note, a ton of it is over my head but it's been so so fun tuning in every once and again to see how Zephyr's Bluetooth Audio work is going. Just wild now much has gone into this! https://github.com/zephyrproject-rtos/zephyr/commits/main/subsys/bluetooth/audio

  👤 mrandish Accepted Answer ✓
I didn't know about Auracast. It seems like one of those useful and obvious features that should already be there. Unfortunately, my quick glance at the tech page on the BT Forum left me thinking it's going to be a long while before it's widely usable by most people.

* There's no BT revision number which requires Auracast support. It requires 5.2 but also requires another hardware capability that's not required by any revision.

* Deployment is going to require support in earbud hardware and firmware, phone hardware, BT stack and app, and support in any external shared source. That's a lot of moving pieces that need to align across a bunch of chip suppliers, product integrators and external stakeholders with divergent priorities and business models.

* One thing I don't see addressed, at least in the surface-level materials, is the issue of IP rights management. I suspect the current (glacial) deployment of lossless and near-lossless BT codecs across the ecosystem will have various IP rights cartels demanding stupidly onerous technical restrictions much like those that have nerfed HDMI's utility in matrixed multi-source, multi-display environments for anything other than "missionary position" basic scenarios.

It sucks but I suspect Auracast may be yet another useful, conceptually obvious feature doomed to appear confusingly inconsistent to mainstream users, be unevenly deployed and usability nerfed - all for annoyingly bad reasons. I very much hope I'm wrong but I've accepted that I live in a perverse future where the technical capabilities I used to dream of as a teen exist but remain denied to most of us in practice for stupid reasons I wouldn't have believed if you'd told me back then.