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generated locally in the ac ceptor so only needs a control signal not the presence of an audio stream
chapter new concepts in bluetooth le audio
user experience is likely to result from providing an out of band ring tone which is generated
by the earbuds using ccp and tbs the user can hear this mixed into their existing audio
stream and decide whether to accept or reject the call if they reject the call they can continue
listening to their or iginal stream in most cases ringtone is best used to manage whether
devices are allowed to interrupt the current audio application with incoming phone calls we
will cover how out of band ringtones are handled in chapter
the unspecified context type is a catch all category every acceptor has to support the
unspecified context type but do esnt need to make it available when an acceptor does
set the unspecified context type as available it is saying that it will accept any context type
other than ones it has specifically s aid it will not support as implementers get used to context
type s some will use this to allow the central device typically a phone to be in charge of the
audio use case in much the same way it is for adp and hfp an acceptor that just sets
unspecified as available is effectively allowing the phone to take full control of what it is
sent we ll discuss the concepts of supported and available in more detail in chapter
all of the context type s are independent of e ach other the use of any one of them does
not imply or require that another one needs to be supported unless that requirement is
imposed by a top level profile as an example support for the ringtone context type does
not generally imply or require support for the conversational context type as ringtone
could be used by itself for an extension bell to alert someone with hearing loss of an incoming
phone call on a land line phone
context type s are used by both initiators and acceptors to provide information about the
use case intended for a stream allowing them to make a decision about whether to accept a
stream to accomplish this they are used in a range of characteristics and ltv metadata
structures youll find them used in this way in the following places
supportedaudiocontexts characteristic pacs
availableaudiocontexts characteristic pacs also used in a server
announcement bap
preferred audio contexts ltv structure metadata in a pac record see also bap
streaming audio contexts ltv structure metadata used by an initiator to label an
audio stream bap
an audio stream can be associated with more than one context type although the intention
is that the context type value represents the current use case the streaming audio contexts
metadata has procedu res to allow a device to update the bitfield values as the use case changes
ltvs are triplet structures consisting of a statement of the length of the structure its type and
the parameter values in that order
section availability
this is typically used where an established stream is used for multiple use cases an example
would be where an audio source mixes in audio from different applications such as a satnav
message that could interrupt music in this case it is efficient to continue to use the same
stream assuming its qos parameters are suitable and just update the current context type
value
availability
bluetooth le audio supports far more poss ibilities and combinations than bluetooth classic
audio to enable devices to make informed choices about what theyre doing they not only
need the ability to tell each other about the use case theyre engaging in which is the reason
for the context typ es but also which ones theyre interested in participating in in the future
this is where availability comes in
as weve seen above context type s are used by acceptors to signal whether they can take
part in a use case thats a ccomplished in two ways an acceptor uses the
availableaudiocontexts characteristic defined in pacs to state which of its supported
audio context type s can currently be used to establish an audio stream audio sources
whether initiators or acceptors also use the streaming audio contexts ltv structure in the
metadata of their codec configurations to inform an audio sink of the use cases that are
associated with an audio stream
bluetooth le audio devices wanting to establish unicast audio streams can also use context
type s to signal their availability before they even start an audio stream by including the
streaming audiocontext s ltv structure in th eir advertising pdus in a similar way
initiators acting as broadcaster s include this in the metadata section of their periodic
advertisement s so that broadcast sink s and broadcast assistant s can filter out the use cases
they want from those they are n ot interested in receiving
for broadcaster s you should note that if the streamingaudiocontexts field is not present
in a codec ids metadata which well get to in chapter it will be interpreted as meaning
that the only supportedaudiocontexts value is unspecified so every broadcast sink can
synchronise to it unless they have specifically set unspecified as non available
audio location
with every previous bluetooth audio specification there was a sin gle bl uetooth le audio
source and a sin gle bl uetooth le audio sink the audio stream was sent as mono or stereo
and it was left to the audio sink to interpret how it was rendered bluetooth le audio is
intended to address applications with multiple speakers or earbuds it ha s the ability to
optimise airtime for each audio sink by only sending it the audio stream it needs in general
for a pair of earbuds the left earbud only receives the left audio stream and the right earbud
only receives the right audio stream that m eans that each audio sink can minimi se the time
that its receiver is on thereby reducing its power consumption
chapter new concept s in bluetooth le audio
to accomplish th is devices need to know what spatial information they are meant to receive
for example a left or a right stream from a ster eo input they do this by specifying an audio
location these are defined in the bluetooth generic audio assigned numbers and follow
the categorization of cta gs table codes for speaker placement the values are
expresse d as bits in a four octet wide bitfield the most common audio locations are shown
in table
audio location value bitmap
front left x bit
front right x bit
front centre x bit
low frequency effects front woofer x bit
back left x bit
back right x bit
prohibited x
table common audio location values
every acceptor which can receive an audio stream must set at least one audio location
leaving the entire bitfield blank is not allowed an audio location is normally set at
manufacture but in some cases it may be changeable by the user for instance a speaker
could have an application or a physical switch to set it to front left or front right
note that mono is not a location as mono is a property of the stream not the physical
rendering device a single channel speaker would normally set both the front left and front