My previous inexpensive car stereo had a small but very helpful feature which I miss a lot on my empeg:

With Traffic Alerts switched on and while listening to CD/MP3 my previous stereo always tuned automatically to a radio sender with traffic announcements in the background. When the sender was lost on the actual frequency it simply auto-tuned to the next one.

Could that be a feature for hijack? Or is it required in the empeg code?

The feature would be to control in MP3-mode frequently, if the radio station is still present (with the traffic announcement capability promoted in the RDS data). If not, simply auto-tune up to the next radio station, look for the TA capability, if not, tune up again, and so on.

This would be extremely helpful as for traffic announcements the choice of the radio station is not important (at least in Germany) but it is definitifly important to receive a strong local radio station with the TA capability. So the AF feature of RDS is not really helpful.

Juergen

forget it.

from previous posts I gather that any next software release for the empeg will take quite some time... thus, http://empeg.comms.net/php/showflat.php?Cat=&Board=sale&Number=164078&page=0&view=collapsed&sb=5&o=21&fpart=

bye,
[L]

Considering the empeg/riocar isn't manufactured anymore and official support has been shutdown, I'd say that what we've got so far is better than all other products out there anyway. empeg could have just dumped the entire product and left the software at v2beta. v3.0 is in testing and will be released soonish according to Rob. It's your choice however if you don't want to wait that long.

More on topic. I know that you can't monitor the tuner without actually listening to it. This applies to the audio but does it apply to the tuner RDS data? If you can still get the RDS data without listening to the tuner then thiis could be possible.

- Trevor

While listening to MP3 it is possible to receive traffic alerts which are signalled via RDS. So it must be possible to track at least RDS in the background. Via RDS it would be possible to analyse whether the actually tuned radio station does provide traffic alerts. If not -> auto-tune.

The interesting question would be
1. if auto-tune could be done in the background
2. if this could be done via hijack

Juergen

Ah okay. I think I know what you're getting at now.
You want it to autotune to the strongest signal that has a TA whilst still playing your MP3s?

It could be done in hijack I think. It would be quite complicated as you'd be fiddling with the tuner without the player softwares knowledge. So you could end up in a funny state depending on how the player tunes. The commands are all detailed in this thread. It's a little way down the page. I think the RDS AF is done using the set freq B commands from what I remember. May or may not help in this case.

- Trevor

In principal right.
It would be sufficient to tune to any radio station (not necessarily the strongest) which signals TA capabilities. Probably it could be done by auto-tuning one station up, wait for RDS and the TA signalisation (30sec or so), if not present tune up to the next station.

The TA signal is not to be mixed up with an Traffic Announcement. The TA signal just informs that the radio station gives frequent traffic announcements. So I would not wait for the announcement, but for the RDS flag that tells me that there will be an announcement.

Juergen

I don't really use RDS as you can tell
Things we'd need to know are how to do the tuner properly, how to control the DSP since the RDS decoding is done in there and how to make hijack do all of this without freaking out the player.

- Trevor

This is what TA is supposed to do; with v2.0 you can listen to MP3s and it will interrupt them for a traffic announce.

However, there are some known bugs with this functionality, as others have noted. These will be worked on for future releases.

Hugo