Earlier this year, I showed you how to get high-quality A2DP audio streaming to your Bluetooth headphones. And while that method of connecting your headphones to a music player does work fine, it really only works with media players and anything else set up to specifically play to your headset. What if you want to watch a Flash video with A2DP audio? How about play a game of Nexuiz through the headset? Well, with that implementation, you can’t.

And next week, with the release of Ubuntu 8.10, that method will not even work anymore due to a new incompatible version of Bluez. But on the flipside, we really don’t even need to do that anymore.

Most distributions include a somewhat recent version of PulseAudio. Love it or hate it, it becomes an excellent tool for the job. Using PulseAudio sinks (outputs), we are able to create a new device visible for Pulse to play to. This means not only your music player, but also your games, websites, and everything else, can play through your wireless headset.

Note: If you used any of the instructions from the previous article, undo them entirely. First make sure your GStreamer output is set back to speaker mode if you used it. Then, delete the .a2dp folder in your home directory. Finally, remove the A2DP Connection script from System > Preferences > Sessions. Leaving anything laying around could interfere with the new process.

Also note that these are merely some things to try out. They are by no means complete; real, full Bluetooth support will come in a later PulseAudio release. PulseAudio 0.9.13 includes the start of this work, but it isn’t too use-friendly at the moment.

Read the rest of Better Bluetooth Audio

Gnac is a simple program for GNOME that allows you to convert audio files from one format to another.

It is built atop of the Gstreamer media framework, meaning that you can import any files that Gstreamer is capable of playing and then output to Gnac’s supported formats for the conversion.

Once you’ve installed the program, it appears under the Sound & Video category, where you can launch it.

The interface is extremely simple. Use the Add button, or drag in a set of input files that you want to convert. Then select the output format from the list box at the bottom. Once you’ve done that, press the Convert button.

The default export options allow you to convert to Ogg/Theora and FLAC as well as WAV and Speex. While the number of export formats built in by default is nowhere near as high as with some programs, particularly those based upon ffmpeg, keeping just a few formats does keep the application simple.

For those people familiar with Gstreamer, it is possible to add to that list and add a new ‘audio profile’ with custom settings, so you are not strictly limited to those audio export formats.

Despite that limitation, Gnac is an effortlessly simple program with a great interface and could come in extremely handy if you’re trying to batch convert a music collection to FLAC or Theora, for example.

The ability to drag a whole load of files in, choose the format and click Convert and then just leave it doing its work makes it perfect for batch jobs.

Gnac 0.1.1 has recently been released, packages for your distribution along with source code to build yourself can be downloaded from here.

MPlayer is one of the many available media playback systems for Linux and Unix-like operating systems and is particularly useful to many people thanks to its support of proprietary and non-standard video formats.

While the use of these formats will undoubtedly be controversial, the pragmatic Linux user will often still want to be able to enjoy media in these other formats, which makes MPlayer a good solution.

Inside your web browser, however, MPlayer’s default plugin interface does not feel very integrated visually with the rest of the system.

Gecko-MediaPlayer is a custom browser plugin which uses MPlayer and its GNOME bindings to provide a better user interface for playing audio and video inside your browser. Any media playable by MPlayer that you come across online can be played back through the plugin, just like the mplayerplug-in package, but with a vastly improved user interface that feels integrated with the GNOME desktop.

Installing the Gecko-MediaPlayer plugin is generally as simple as installing the gecko-mediaplayer package. You may want to remove the mplayerplug-in package first if it is installed, to avoid conflicts between the two browser plugins.

Once you’ve installed and restarted your browser, any media that MPlayer can handle will show up in the new interface.

If you’re a GNOME user that also chooses MPlayer as their media solution for the web, installing this package is a quick and easy way to improve your online viewing experience, through a better integrated UI.