In this part of our blog series dedicated to Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) Audio we would like to walk you through a couple of groundbreaking use cases we have been working on recently.
All of them revolve around Auracast, the new BLE Audio feature that allows one device to stream music to multiple listeners.
For each scenario, we provide a picture of the engineering test setup. Development kits are used to simulate real world devices. In almost all the cases, the green devkits represent Auracast sources (aka gateways), while the blue ones represent the receivers.
BLE Audio brings quite a few exciting new features. Our scenarios demonstrate three of them – Auracast, controlling the audio stream in the receiver, and building a mobile application that allows the user to switch between broadcast audio streams. These features were selected because they will improve our day-to-day listening experience and at the same time, they bring new business opportunities for both digital service providers and manufacturers of electronic devices.
Scenario 1 – Switching two Auracasts based on their priority
This scenario simulates a situation whereby you are waiting at an airport listening to music on your earbuds, but you want the music to be interrupted in case an announcement regarding your departure gate occurs. The receiver board in the middle of the picture is listening normally to the low priority music Auracast source coming from the gateway board on the left. When the gateway on the righthand side gets activated, a high priority Auracast source starts transmitting. The receiver automatically detects this broadcast and starts to play the message. Once the high priority source gets deactivated again, the receiver switches back to receiving the low priority music source which was interrupted.
Scenario 2 - Music stream interrupted by phone call
Imagine that you are listening to music from your laptop or to audio from a movie from a TV. At the same time, you want an incoming phone call to interrupt the current audio stream. This is exactly what this scenario is about. At first, the receiver listens to music from the Auracast source on the lefthand side. Then the board on the righthand acting as a phone gets activated and the music is interrupted by an incoming call. When the call is finished, the receiver automatically switches back to hearing the original source and the music plays again. 
Scenario 3 - Switch between two Auracasts using the Tietoevry Commander mobile application
Our third scenario demonstrates a simple use case – switching between two Auracast sources, this time based on user selection. However, how the desired source gets selected by the user is of most interest – it is done using our multiplatform mobile application. The application currently offers three ways of selecting the source of interest. A user can either select the audio source from a list by taping its name on the display, scan a QR code or even an NFC tag that represent the Auracast source they want to hear. 
Conclusions
This post showed a couple of examples on how Tietoevry software engineering teams work with bleeding edge technologies in our client projects. If we got you intrigued and you would like to see a live demo of the above-described use cases, or to discuss your BLE Audio project needs, just let us know.
Also, if you are interested in BLE Audio, make sure to read the previous two parts of our BLE Audio blog series – part 1 and part 2.
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Summary of BLE Audio series
Ladislav Podivin is a senior software engineer at Tietoevry focusing on BLE Audios and other new technologies. He has 10+ years of experience with software development in R&D environment in fields such as aerospace or electron microscopy. During his career he has worked in various roles ranging from a developer to a people manager and a product owner.