Can't turn the car radio off
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Stupid android-based car system will turn the radio on every time I turn the car on, and if I want to leave the system on to use the GPS I can't find a way to turn the radio off without also turning the GPS off or muting it.
Maybe there is something on the manual but fuck having to search the manual for something as simple as it.
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@fbmac said in Can't turn the car radio off:
but fuck
?
here is something on the manual but fuck having to search
Now you exposed your internet search habits, they check that on the border you know.
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My car is from 2014 or so and has the same issue, and so is my mother's car (from 2015 or so). None are high-end models, or have fancy complicated features (my mother's car doesn't even have a GPS), I have no idea whether they are using Android or some other weird auto-manufacturer OS.
If you want to use any of the features but not have sound, you have to mute (or turn down the volume). I find that absolutely stupid.
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Meanwhile, I have an older car with a radio that doesn't link with my phone, and has a nice big button to turn it off
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@RaceProUK I have a newer car that links with my phone and it, too, has an off button.
I've never heard of such a thing as no off button on a car radio. What car makers are doing this?
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Step 1: get an FM transmitter
Step 2: transmit something through it
Step 3: tune the radio to this frequency
Step 4: save the frequency as a stored station
Step 5: turn off the transmitterYou now have a stored frequency that will be silent, and can switch to it when you want no radio
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@Jaloopa Will it be silent, or will you get white noise instead?
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@Jaloopa said in Can't turn the car radio off:
Step 1: get an FM transmitter
Step 2: transmit something through itIf the transmitter is strong enough that your outside antenna picks up what's sent from inside the car, you're probably going to have problem with some regulatory agency.
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@asdf said in Can't turn the car radio off:
@Jaloopa said in Can't turn the car radio off:
Step 1: get an FM transmitter
Step 2: transmit something through itIf the transmitter is strong enough that your outside antenna picks up what's sent from inside the car, you're probably going to have problem with some regulatory agency.
Not at all: you can get mini-FM transmitters here in the UK from Amazon and stuff (I used to have one for my PSP). They're low enough power to not interfere with normal broadcasts, and the car aerial picks them up because it's at most five feet away.
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@RaceProUK said in Can't turn the car radio off:
Not at all: you can get mini-FM transmitters here in the UK from Amazon and stuff
I know they're allowed if they're very weak, but from what I've heard those don't work reliably in cars. Probably depends on the exact layout of the car and the strength of the signal from regular radio stations.
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@asdf I never had an issue, but then that was in cars with the aerial above the windscreen rather than on the tailgate.
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@boomzilla said in Can't turn the car radio off:
I've never heard of such a thing as no off button on a car radio. What car makers are doing this?
In my case, a Peugeot (cue "here's your problem" meme...) and a Skoda (=Volkswagen).
You can still mute, which I guess would be the constructor's helpline anwer -- AS_DESIGNED_WONT_FIX.
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@RaceProUK said in Can't turn the car radio off:
Will it be silent, or will you get white noise instead?
In my experience with modern car stereos, they go silent when they have no signal but sound a bit white when they're almost picking up a station
@asdf said in Can't turn the car radio off:
I know they're allowed if they're very weak, but from what I've heard those don't work reliably in cars.
If your aerial can't pick up the signal from within the car, put it next to the aerial. You don't need to be driving while doing this, just transmitting enough to be able to lock an auto tuning radio onto an otherwise empty frequency
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@remi said in Can't turn the car radio off:
You can still mute, which I guess would be the constructor's helpline anwer -- AS_DESIGNED_WONT_FIX.
: Why would anyone want to turn off their car radio? That sounds like very advanced usage.
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@boomzilla said in Can't turn the car radio off:
I've never heard of such a thing as no off button on a car radio
On my car, the radio is also the AC control, trip meter etc. All on a touch screen. Turning it off entirely would mean no control over the fans or temperature.
I would possibly run into the same issue if I'd bought the package with a built in satnav, but I use my phone instead. If I want spoken directions I connect through Bluetooth and play something off my phone's music player or podcast if I don't want silence otherwise. I could also use my phone's FM radio if I wanted to but I never do
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@asdf said in Can't turn the car radio off:
from what I've heard those don't work reliably in cars
When I was a kid, we had a trunk*-based CD player that worked on this principle; the tuner would project on a low FM frequency and the radio picked it up. It worked great.
* In a Nissan Pathfinder, so it wasn't enclosed all the way
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@Jaloopa said in Can't turn the car radio off:
On my car, the radio is also the AC control, trip meter etc. All on a touch screen. Turning it off entirely would mean no control over the fans or temperature.
So you also always have to have the AC running? I'm not talking about turning off the touchscreen, just the radio.
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@boomzilla no, the AC and fans can all be turned off. I can turn the radio off in the sense that it's not projecting any noise by muting it. Alerts like low fuel are still audible but I suspect if I had a built in satnav it would use the same volume control as the radio, so to have spoken directions but no music you'd need to find some source that was silent
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@Jaloopa Exactly.
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@boomzilla but that's the original complaint. Turning off the radio means turning off GPS or having it silent. It's still possible to mute the radio, but not to divorce its volume from the directions
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@Jaloopa I guess I got confused because you were talking about the OP but replying directly to me.
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@Jaloopa said in Can't turn the car radio off:
if I had a built in satnav it would use the same volume control as the radio, so to have spoken directions but no music you'd need to find some source that was silent
Hmm on my dad's old Audi (A6, like 10 years old or so) the satnav voice and the radio have separate volume settings, so it's entirely possible to only mute one of them without affecting the other. Which is great, because nobody in our family wants the stupid satnav voice XD
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@asdf said in Can't turn the car radio off:
@Jaloopa said in Can't turn the car radio off:
Step 1: get an FM transmitter
Step 2: transmit something through itIf the transmitter is strong enough that your outside antenna picks up what's sent from inside the car, you're probably going to have problem with some regulatory agency.
Do they not have these in Euroland?
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@Polygeekery said in Can't turn the car radio off:
Do they not have these in Euroland?
See above. I know, reading is a barrier to posting. ;)
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@asdf I prefer to go off half-cocked.
(more fodder for the "Quotes out of context" thread.)
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@Polygeekery said in Can't turn the car radio off:
@asdf I prefer to go off half-cocked.
(more fodder for the "Quotes out of context" thread.)
And off-by-one.
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I've never been happier to own an old car. Lackadaisical security, pointless "connected" features, so much conflicting software that you can't turn off the damn radio.. makes you wonder why anyone buys new. Who is asking for this shit?
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@asdf said in Can't turn the car radio off:
I know they're allowed if they're very weak, but from what I've heard those don't work reliably in cars
It's pretty easy to make a transmitter that's powerful enough to hear with the car's antenna but not much more than that. Due to how FM works, even if you pick a channel in use, most people will only hear a little interference.
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@aapis A lot of this fancy equipment starts off on top-line BMWs and Mercs and Audis, then filters down to the lesser models, before ending up on shopping-cart superminis as the manufacturers try to pretend that their cheap mass-market hatchbacks are somehow just as special as $100,000 luxury saloons.
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@asdf Fuck that shit! Unless you enjoy some random music or Spanish radio in the middle of your audio book. US cars that do not have audio jack, also fuck them.
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@dse said in Can't turn the car radio off:
US cars that do not have audio jack, also fuck them.
How would you fuck them if they don't have anything you can plug into?
OK, that one was really bad
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@asdf Easy! It takes courage.
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I surprisingly have a similar issue, but my car PC isn't Android, it's Windows 10-based. The problem is that the GPS software was designed for Windows XP and doesn't control very easily the volume. It was apparently expected that you were going to be using the GPS software standalone with no other audio playing, every time it "speaks" the audio glitches a bit as it switches in raw audio buffers or something.
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@asdf said in Can't turn the car radio off:
@dse said in Can't turn the car radio off:
US cars that do not have audio jack, also fuck them.
How would you fuck them if they don't have anything you can plug into?
I know that size doesn't matter, but if you think of an audio jack as something appropriate for that, you must have, hem, really large hands...
OK, that one was really bad
Aaaaand it's getting worse...
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@remi said in Can't turn the car radio off:
I know that size doesn't matter, but if you think of an audio jack as something appropriate for that, you must have, hem, really large hands...
I'm surprised it took three hours for someone to post that reply. :P
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@asdf said in Can't turn the car radio off:
How would you fuck them if they don't have anything you can plug into?
Duh.
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@Tsaukpaetra said in Can't turn the car radio off:
I surprisingly have a similar issue, but my car PC isn't Android, it's Windows 10-based.
Having your car reboot at random times is not what I would consider a similar issue
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@TimeBandit said in Can't turn the car radio off:
@Tsaukpaetra said in Can't turn the car radio off:
I surprisingly have a similar issue, but my car PC isn't Android, it's Windows 10-based.
Having your car reboot at random times is not what I would consider a similar issue
Actually, since it can't get connected to the internet, it never installs Updates, and therefore never tries to reboot on its own.
No, the nominal issue I usually have is the BIOS failing to POST due to the memory card ready not initializing properly or something.
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@Tsaukpaetra said in Can't turn the car radio off:
I surprisingly have a similar issue, but my car PC isn't Android, it's Windows 10-based. The problem is that the GPS software was designed for Windows XP and doesn't control very easily the volume. It was apparently expected that you were going to be using the GPS software standalone with no other audio playing, every time it "speaks" the audio glitches a bit as it switches in raw audio buffers or something.
It takes the right combination of Latitude/Longitude, speed and rock music to see your last BSOD
On the bright side, that will turn off your audio.
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Meanwhile, in our car we kinda need to replace the entertainment unit...
- It won't load CDs at all (a couple of months back it had a CD in, then suddenly decided the CD didn't exist; so not only would it not play it, but clearly no possible purpose would be served in trying to eject it. I tried to get it out manually for a while but couldn't. Later it ejected the CD after going over a bump, but it's now impossible to load a CD into it, at least without applying more force than I am comfortable with.)
- It will not recognise a USB stick any more. Not sure when this started happening since we usually only use a USB stick for music when we go on a long trip and don't want to take a heap of CDs; sometime in the last couple of years this stopped working.
- It has an input jack so you can play music from an external player. This works for around 30-60 seconds, then it decides the external player doesn't exist any more and switches back to radio. It will not recognise the external player again (e.g. by unplugging it and plugging it back in) until after an engine restart.
- The radio works though.
This was not exactly fun to discover on our latest long trip - we knew the CD thing might be an issue (though we hadn't tried it), but we didn't expect that the USB and external input were also going to fail.
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@Jaloopa said in Can't turn the car radio off:
I suspect if I had a built in satnav it would use the same volume control as the radio
Both my cars have built-in sat nav and they both have the navigation volume as separate to the radio (or other source of media) volume. Turning the entire unit off obviously turns them both off but muting one without muting the other is possible.
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@fbmac said in Can't turn the car radio off:
Stupid android-based car system will turn the radio on every time I turn the car on, and if I want to leave the system on to use the GPS I can't find a way to turn the radio off without also turning the GPS off or muting it.
Maybe there is something on the manual but fuck having to search the manual for something as simple as it.
Plug in an aux cable, leave the end unplugged, set audio in to aux?
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@sloosecannon He could also RTFM and see if the feature already exists. He chooses not to.
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@loopback0 said in Can't turn the car radio off:
@sloosecannon He could also RTFM and see if the feature already exists. He chooses not to.
True.
He'd rather delete the manual
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@loopback0 I didn't find it in the manual, and Cunningham's Law say the best way to find an answer is post something wrong on the internet
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@sloosecannon said in Can't turn the car radio off:
He'd rather delete the manual
He better be careful though: he doesn't want to accidentally delete the car.
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@Scarlet_Manuka said in Can't turn the car radio off:
Meanwhile, in our car we kinda need to replace the entertainment unit...
Did you try turning it off and on again? Seriously, might be worth trying a full restart by unplugging the car battery for a while. First check if the unit has one of those anti-theft features where you have to input a security code though. If it does, you'll need that code.
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@fbmac Most cars work like that. I have a pre-computer everything car and the radio will turn on once the key is the on (but no ignition) if the radio was on before the car was turned off.
turn the radio off before you take the key out?
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@lucas1 but then I can't use Google maps with it.
It's a very underpowered Android that is laggy with maps anyway, so I'm just using my phone
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@fbmac Use the phone. Car computers are shite. I am glad I don't have one.
Plus the phone has google maps and spotify / mp3 whatever.
I run everything through the Aux and I bought a £10 phone holder. I also have a bluetooth thing for in car phone calls.
My default car radio has the ability to do MP3 CDS (probably worth it in 2006).