AudioBridge: Android Smartphone as a Wireless Headset for Windows

⚡ The gist in 5 seconds - An Android smartphone turns into wireless headphones and a microphone for a Windows PC: system audio goes to the phone and then to Bluetooth headphones connected to it, while the phone's microphone appears on the PC as a regular microphone. - Available in Releases: AudioBridge.exe for Windows 10/11 x64 and AudioBridge.apk for Android 8.0+ (arm64); the microphone requires VB-CABLE, and the interface is currently in Russian. - Limitations: Bluetooth adds its usual 100–200 ms on top of the 30–40 ms network latency over Wi-Fi; on Xiaomi/HyperOS/MIUI you need to manually enable autostart, remove battery restrictions, and pin the app in Recents. ### 🔍 What was found The Lyten02/AudioBridge project consists of two apps working as a pair. The audio path from the PC: WASAPI loopback → Opus → QUIC datagrams → jitter buffer → AAudio → Bluetooth headphones. In the reverse direction: the phone's microphone is captured via AAudio, encoded in Opus, and sent to the PC, where it shows up as CABLE Output (VB-CABLE). The phone only sends the microphone when some app on the PC is actually recording audio. The codec is Opus, 192 kbps, stereo, 48 kHz. The connection is peer-to-peer over iroh QUIC: it works on a LAN, via NAT hole punching, Tailscale, or an encrypted relay server as a last resort. The phone and PC don't have to be on the same Wi-Fi network. Everything is end-to-end encrypted (QUIC/TLS) and authenticated with a secret from a QR code; pairing takes one scan: the PC shows the code, the phone scans it. Up to 8 computers are supported simultaneously: their audio is mixed, and the microphone goes only to those actually using it. You can mute one PC or all of them at once from the phone, while they stay connected. ### 💡 Why it matters The smartphone's microphone appears on the PC as a regular microphone — for Discord, Zoom, OBS, or games. The "Mic" toggle on the PC does everything at once: it enables the phone's microphone and sets CABLE Output as the default Windows microphone, and restores the previous one when turned off. Control is bidirectional: from the PC you can adjust the PC's and phone's volume, the phone's microphone, and the default Windows microphone; from the phone — the PC's audio and microphone toggles, its volume, and mute. Both sides run in the background, start at boot, and reconnect automatically — no accounts, servers, or manual IP entry. The load is low: about 1–2% of one core on the PC and 4–5% on the phone during playback. ### 🧩 Context The architecture is split into crates: crates/core — networking, Opus encoding, and the receive path (a small NetEQ-like jitter buffer with adaptive target delay, packet loss concealment, and clock drift compensation); crates/desktop — a Windows tray app built on WASAPI and egui; crates/android-native — a JNI library using AAudio, and the android/ directory — a Kotlin/Compose app with a foreground service. The PC part is installed to %LOCALAPPDATA%\Programs\AudioBridge, enables autostart, and requires permission in Windows Firewall. Building from source is done via cargo and gradlew (requires Android SDK, NDK r23, and cargo-ndk), Rust ≥ 1.92; Opus is vendored and built via cc, no cmake needed

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