I have some bluetooth earbuds, Jabra Elite 3’s, that I use with my phone most of the time. I also share them as well so sometimes they’re connected to someone else’s phone. I also like to connect them to my macbook. The frustrating thing is though, I’ve succesfully paired them with all of these 3 devices before, but it’s really frustrating to connect them to something other than the last device they connected to.
If they most recently connected to my phone before and I decide to use them with my laptop, I remove them from their case, but they immediately connect to my phone. This is good, because that’s usually what I want them to do, but I hoped I could, from my laptop select them from the list of nearby bluetooth devices and click ‘connect’ and thereby sever that connection between the headphones and my phone, in favour of the new connection between the laptop and the headphones instead. This doesn’t work, the computer just says connecting for a long time, and then stops saying that (but doesn’t say anything about having failed).
Ok, I figured, that sort of makes sense, after all you wouldn’t want people to be able to just break your connection at will if you’re using the headphones (although it would require having previously paired them, but still, devil’s advocate I suppose). So I reasoned, you must have to disconnect them from the phone first, on my headphones that’s achievable by just pressing the button on each bud once. Doing this disconnects them from the phone, but doesn’t them leave them available to other devices for connection, they remain only available to the phone if you press the button again. The only way to finally sever this connection to allow the laptop access is to fully switch off bluetooth on my phone. This pisses me off but it’s not a huge big deal, but the trouble here is, that’s only if they’re connected to my phone. The headphones are shared. I would have thought the ‘ownership’ of the headphones (for lack of a better word) would give precedence to physical access to the headphones. Therefore, if you have the ability to press the disconnect button on the headphones, then you’re most likely the person making the conscious decision to replace one connection with another. I can’t control someone else’s phone, I’m the one with the headphones, but I can’t choose what device they connect to.
Rant aside, this genuinely is a question because it just seems so illogical for it to work this way that I’m betting on there being something I’m missing that would allow common sense to prevail and let me replace one connection with another.
What you are trying to do is most likely not possible: Bluetooth works on a “master/slave” connection (one device controls the connection, the other follows its lead). Most wireless peripherals like headphones will start as the master to initiate that original connection with the PC/phone, but then downgrade. The slave cannot sever the connection—it can turn off its radio, but that’s about it.
In specs, it’s possible for a slave to have multiple master devices, but it’s not enforced. I would hazard a guess that wireless earbuds simply ignore this to keep firmware sizes small—I can only imagine how much more code goes into mixing multiple audio channels over multiple connections vs only handling one connection.
That being said, i do have a workaround: keep your earbuds connected to an intermediate device—e.g. your phone—and then stream audio from your other devices (like your PCs) through that device. Here’s an app that lets you stream computer audio through an android phone, and here’s a video of that in action
Thanks for the in-depth answer. Disappointing news, but very interesting to hear about the nuts and bolts of it all.
Hey man, it’s been a year but thought you’d be interested to know. I lost those Jabras and had to buy a pair of LG Bluetooth headphones to replace them. These ones do what I want them to do. On a given device with a screen and UI and Bluetooth capabilities, I can choose the headphones from the list of devices and so long as I’ve previously paired them before, doing so severs the connection between the headphones and any device they might already be connected and establishes a connection between the headphones that device I’m operating. For some reason it doesn’t seem to work 100% reliably, often it seems to require one connection attempt to sever the connection and another to actually establish the new connection but other times it’s all done in action. In any case, it seems it’s technically possible.