How to reconnect to a already paired bluetooth A2DP headset?

Anonymous

I use a bluetooth stereo headset with my Laptop running Windows7/Fedora 12 and also with my mobile phone and with my ipod. I want to connect my headset to one of above devices at a time.

I have paired my headset with all of above devices (Windows 7, Fedora 12, my mobile and my ipod). Suppose I've currently connected my headset to the ipod and now I want to use it with my mobile. All I have to do is disconnect headset from ipod and connect it to my mobile. (The 'connect' and 'disconnect' facilities are there in both my ipod and mobile).

Suppose now I want to use the headset with Windows 7. (it's already paired and shown under Bluetooth Devices). Surprisingly in windows 7 there's no way of connecting to a already paired headset. (when you right-click on the headset icon under bluetooth devices there's no 'connect' options.). Now one might ask why don't you restart the headset? But it'll never work since headset will try to connect to the last device it connected. (in this case my mobile phone). Only way I can connect my headset to Windows 7 now is putting the headset back into pairing mode, deleting the headset from windows, and re pair it. This will take a lotof time and this will also install drivers for four bluetooth profiles headset supports. (A2DP, AVRCP, handsfree, headset). (This will also create a system restore point to make things slower).

Similar to my mobile phone and ipod in Fedora linux it's just a matter of right clicking bluetooth icon and selecting 'connect'. I have not used windows for a long time and may be I miss something very obvious or the way Windows 7 bluetooth works is very frustrating.

I use Windows 7 professional in a Dell Inspiron laptop. The bluetooth stack used is the one supplied with Wndows 7.

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Anonymous

Hi Jeff,

Reconnecting using Playback Devices works for reconnecting an already paired A2DP Bluetooth Headset to your PC, per the OP. Headsets are usually "dumb" in the respect that you cannot ask them to connect to a specific device, they just try to reconnect to the last device they connected to. Using "Playback Devices" gets around this by getting your computer to ping the device and ask it for a connection.

It sounds like you're having a totally different issue to the OP, namely that you can't get your android phone to connect to your PC after you've paired it. It's probably worth starting a new thread on that issue as it is completely separate to reconnecting "dumb" devices.

Apologies if I've misunderstood you.

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67 additional answers

Anonymous

2012-01-14T07:34:28+00:00

I found a work around. All you have to do is turn off the bluetooth adaptor by right clicking bluetooth icon on system tray and turn is on back. If your headset is available the computer will connect to it. (make sure one slot is available on your headset, i.e if your headset supports two devices simultaneously, make sure you dont have two devices connected to it already.) Worked for me, hope this works for you too.
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Anonymous

2012-01-02T08:55:38+00:00

Same problem here, but the "fun" part in my case is that the paired audio device which I cannot reconnect to is shown in the audio settings, but not in the bluetooth devices, so I don't know how to remove it to re-pair it.

I hope I can remove it anyway, because at this moment the headset is useless with my win7 machine.
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Anonymous

2011-11-10T17:43:49+00:00

This is frustrating. This issue has been outstanding for too long. I'm another IT Professional. The issue is not drivers. The issue is the Bluetooth stack. As the OP posted, there's to way to control disconnect / reconnect operations from the OS. Simple. Can you add that into the stack? Please?

The ONLY WAY to reconnect a bluetooth headset that has the A2DP profile is to remove the device and repair it. It works FINE then, until you connect the headset to another device. And I'll add, disabling Bluetooth on the other devices, so that the headset fails over to Windows 7 instead. DOES NOT work.

Jabra Icon

Win7 Enterprise

Thank you.
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Anonymous

2011-11-05T10:38:42+00:00

This is boilerplate which is totally unrelated to the question.
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