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      09-16-2009, 05:05 PM   #7
shag
pullin a boat
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Drives: 2021 X3 M40i
Join Date: Jan 2008
Location: Canada

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It's because of all the moronic broadcast engineers who transmit the song info in the PS field. This only happens in North America for some reason, because most American car radios have only PS support and not full RT/TMC/EON or other RDS features.

The PS (Program Service) field is normally an 8-character fixed ID which helps an RDS radio recognize your network or station ID. In NA, a few broadcast techs thought it would be fun to update the PS field every 3 or 4 seconds with an almost scrolling form of song/artist info. This leads to weird names like:

"Pink Flo"
"yd - Com"
"fortably"
" Numb"

...and other weird displays, such as station advertisements, even company ads, etc.

Normally your station or network callsign should be transmitted in the PS field (the one you see on BMW radios) and the song/artist info should be transmitted in a separate field, called the RT field (Radio-Text). Not sure BMW radios support this though.

If bbimmer79's workaround exists in NA iDrives, this should solve your problem.
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