It all started when a woman reached out asking me to help her choose a microphone. I’ve been making music on the side for years, so she figured I’d know my way around audio gear. She wanted a lavalier mic, and I recommended the Shure MoveMic.
Turns out, the mic only works via Bluetooth through Shure’s proprietary app. If you want to connect it to Logic Pro or use it as a camera mic on your iPhone, you need a $200 receiver. But here’s the thing—Bluetooth works. It’s just sandboxed inside their app. They’re running their own data transmission protocol.
That’s when I started digging into how I could actually use this perfectly good Bluetooth mic at home without the extra hardware. Eventually, I stumbled onto information about Bluetooth device sniffing. It wasn’t about the $200—I just wanted the experience of cracking open a proprietary protocol.
What’s Next
So I’ve got everything I need to get started: a Mac, a developer account, and PacketLogger ready to go.
The plan? Intercept the traffic between the Shure app and the MoveMic, dissect the packets, and figure out what’s really happening behind the curtain.
I’ll be analyzing the GATT profile, hunting for proprietary UUIDs, reverse engineering the audio codec, and piecing together the protocol byte by byte. The end goal—build my own client that talks directly to the mic. No $200 receiver. No sandboxed app. Just raw Bluetooth.
Will it be a weekend project or a month-long rabbit hole? Is the protocol wide open or locked down with encryption and device binding? I have no idea yet.
But that’s exactly what makes it fun.
Part 2 coming soon.
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