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Radio app on Samsung XCover 4s - Radio text is displayed with � characters

(Topic created on: 25-02-2021 07:58 PM)
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jorgk3
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I'm in Spain where they use accented characters. The radio text shown by the FM radio app shows texts with �, for example: Caf� instead of Café, see another example here: https://www.instagram.com/p/CIHaekSD4PF/

 

The encoding issue could be in the transmitted data or it could be an issue with the app itself.

 

Anyone knows more?

17 REPLIES 17
CrazyTom2k2
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All done! Hope we hear back from a mod soon! :smiling-face:

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jorgk3
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I haven't seen any action here. Instead the systems sends me e-mail on whether the issue has been resolved. Maybe Samsung could take note and resolve it.

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pjzzz
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A little off-topic but could anyone of you that uses the FM radio App check if you receive FM in Stereo?

 Mine doesn't and FM is only Mono and I would like to know if this is a bug or intentional. My old Samsung does receive FM in Stereo but my Xcover 4s won't.

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jorgk3
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100% off-topic.

This is a tough question since in normal radio programs you don't have trucks driving from left to right, so it's hard to tell. Judging by the "in-head localisation", I'd say it's mostly mono. Sometimes I have a "wow" moment, I guess that's when it switches to stereo on a really strong station. Radio reception is quite poor on this device; I think it's mostly operating on mono to adapt to its poor reception ability. Can you suggest a test to give you a better answer?

You're the guy who had direct contact with Samsung service, so you could ask them directly. But first, try a station with a strong signal.

pjzzz
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Thank you for replying and checking.

I do have an FM transmitter in my house that broadcasts in stereo and when i listen to my music on other radio's in my home they all receive my strong broadcast signal in stereo but the Xcover 4S doesn't.

Even standing 1 mtr from my FM transmitter it play's mono. I unplugged the left-input on my transmitter and on my Xcover 4s it still play's music on the left and right earbud. So I conclude that the FM receiver on my or maybe every other Xcover 4S is really borked to say the least 😞

Sadly Samsung did not reply to my question.

On-topic:
I've noticed that an RDS capable receiver I use in my shed is losing coherence in displaying RDS text when it receives a weak signal. Maybe the weak reception from the Xcover 4S is causing garbled RDS text as well.

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jorgk3
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I did some more listening today and I'm sure the reception is stereo for a single "strong" station I can receive here. At times the phone spontaneously switches back to mono. As far as I can see, will go back to stereo when tuning to this station again.

On-topic: Thanks for the observation but I'm in Spain here and the only characters that are displayed with a UTF-8 replacement character are accented characters  and ñ ¡Sí, señor! So it's pretty clear that either a) the station emits the a single-byte old EBU Latin character (charset similar to ISO-8859-1 or windows-1252) in a "UTF-8" packet (RDS2), so the phone correctly displays the non-UTF-8 character with a replacement character, or b) the phone doesn't follow even follow full RDS(1) and messes up old EBU Latin. I'll be travelling to another country soon where they also use non-ASCII characters and I will check how RDS displays there. If it works there, we need to blame the Spanish radio station, if it doesn't work there either, it's likely to be an issue with the phone. I also have a Nokia 1 with a radio app to compare.

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jorgk3
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OK, I'm in Germany now and the display of non-ASCII characters doesn't work here either, here two screenshots from different stations:

Bad RDS text display, two German stationsBad RDS text display, two German stations

So it's highly likely that the Samsung Radio app is defective and doesn't interpret the single-byte old EBU Latin character encoding correctly. @CrazyTom2k2, can we get some traction on this issue in the near future please? Can I get in touch with the developers? I'm an Android developer myself, I'm sure that I can fix the app if I can get access to the source code. Does Samsung listen to its customers or do they just provide this pretty forum and ignore all the input? It's been a while since I started this and haven't had any official feedback.

 
 
 
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pjzzz
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"Does Samsung listen to its customers or do they just provide this pretty forum and ignore all the input?"

What do you think? For me it's clear that they don't give a F.CK about their customers after selling their devices to us.😠

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