Streaming music to laptop speakers from Samsung Note 4

There are many posts in the internet that provide how to guides on using your laptop as the music streaming receiver to play your music from your smartphone using Bluetooth connection method. In other words, how to make your laptop to become a wireless Bluetooth speakers for your smartphone.

Why?

The reason behind using laptop is because most laptops comes with relatively good pair of stereo speakers (compare to those of your smartphone) and you can save yourself some money by avoiding buying expensive wireless Bluetooth speakers.



Most of the how to guides using Bluetooth in the internet on laptops are running Windows version before Windows 10. As I found out the hard way is that Windows 10 on my laptop doesn't work with those Bluetooth method guides; because whenever I connect my smartphone (Samsung Galaxy Note 4) with my Windows 10 laptop, it doesn't have the Bluetooth A2DP profile to enable the media streaming between my smartphone with my laptop. This has lead me to a dead end on using Bluetooth connection methods.

I finally found 2 methods that works for me!

Microsoft Connect

The first method that works is by using Windows 10 built-in "Connect" app as a wireless display for my smartphone. Once connected, the app will mirror my smartphone display into my Windows 10 laptop display. It does not only mirror the display of my smartphone, it also mirror the audio of my smartphone. Having said this, it's already capable of streaming my music from my smartphone music player to my laptop speakers. This method is most likely can work with other smartphones which support screen mirroring or screen casting to wireless display which I would think it is a pretty standard feature in today's smartphone.

This is how I setup my Samsung Galaxy Note 4 to cast my smartphone screen to my laptop screen.

Step 1:
Ensure both of your laptop and smartphone WiFi is enabled and connected to the same network.

Step 2:
Using the Windows 10 search function, search for "Connect" and run the application on your Windows 10 laptop.

Step 3:
Enable the "Screen Mirroring" feature of the Samsung Galaxy Note 4 by pulling down the notification drawer. A window listing your laptop name will pop up.

Step 4:
Select your laptop name.

Step 5:
Once connected, your smartphone screen will appear on your laptop screen.

Step 6:
In your smartphone, run your music player and start playing.

Samsung SideSync

The second method works somewhat the same way but it only applies to Samsung Galaxy smartphone. The reason behind this is because you need to install Samsung's SideSync application into both your Windows 10 laptop and your Samsung Galaxy Smartphone. Since I owned a Samsung Galaxy Note 4 smartphone, this method also applies to me. What this Samsung SideSync application do is, also mirror the display and audio to my laptop. However, this application can do much more than the Microsoft Connect app such as file transfers between my smartphone and my laptop and whole other features that I won't mention here as it is out of topic from this post.

I am not providing the setup steps here as the application will guide you through how to set it up and use it.

Conclusion

These 2 methods works flawlessly for me.

Do you have other methods to use your laptop as your wireless speakers to stream your music collection from your smartphone?