Radio preset names

[MarkN]

We finally got our i3 last night! It will be my wife's car, and since I'm the "technical" one in the family (even though she has a PhD in biology) I was setting it up for her, including programming her favorite stations as radio presets. The car has professional navigation and should have up-to-date firmware since it was a factory order. When I created the presets, the car used whatever text was displaying from the station's RDS feed as the preset station name, e.g. one of the presets ended up with the name "hello".

If I selected a preset and pressed the "Option" button I was sometimes given the option of choosing something else from the RDS feed as a name, so for one preset I was able to change its name to "on KUNC", which at least contains the call sign. Is there some way edit the preset names similar to editing profile names? Or at least end up with the call signs as the names? The list of stations displayed under Radio->FM has the call signs (mostly). Would exporting her profile to a USB stick give me an XML file I could edit and then re-import?

 

[alohart]

Would exporting her profile to a USB stick give me an XML file I could edit and then re-import?

Good idea, but looking at the XML profile file, the content is encrypted and signed. So even if you could decrypt the content, you'd need to figure out how to sign the changed content which might not be so easy. So hopefully, someone will be able to tell you how to change the preset labels.

 

[easports82]

I see that when HD radio isn't enabled. If the radio just picks up the standard signal, the text seems to be random. In my experience, switching on HD ensures that the call letters are displayed.

 

[Jeffj]

Something else to try (took me quite a while to figure this out) is to save select stations as "favorites" (I forget the actual term in iDrive). This is done by pressing the iDrive controller when you are using it to scroll through a list of stations to listen to.

Once you have some favorites saved, then, when selecting the Radio button on the iDrive console, you select "Favorites" instead of AM/FM/Satellite. At that point, the "favorites" can be cycled through by using the thumb-wheel on the right side of the steering wheel. The stations display on the control display with their actual names (KUNC, 80's on 8, KBCO - HD, etc.). From that point on, as long as you don't specifically select a different band by pressing the Radio button, the thumbwheel continues to function as scrolling through the stations.

This sounds complicated, but once you've selected favorites, it makes it really easy to scroll through your personal list of stations. Its pretty efficient.