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QotD: RDS

Question: Does your car stereo (or other story) have the RDS?

My Answer: The RDS is the thing that tells you the song name, artist, and radio station. Car radios without RDS always display "101.3." It's been out for awhile and I can't imagine it's terribly costly. My radio supports it, but only about half of the popular radio stations in Erie, PA broadcast RDS data.

You are encouraged to answer the Question of the Day for yourself in the comments or on your blog.

6 Responses to "QotD: RDS"

  1. RDS is standard here in the UK - 99% of stations use it and a vast majority of car radios have it. However, we only use it for the name of the station!

  2. Mine does, and a number of the stations here use it.

    however, I kind of wish my iTrip used it. Now I think that would be cool.. of course I don't think its possible since it has an audio only connection.

  3. We'll, I've got it, but no stations here in Sweden use it for any good purposes. First of all, the public service stations don't use it at all but to broadcast their names. The commercial radio stations use it to send ads... :-/

  4. Yes. 2000 Audi S4. For the first couple years, no stations broadcast with the info, and then all of a sudden I started seeing station description, and then many started including song names, etc. It was fairly funny, having a feature I didn't know about until 2 years after I got the car.

    I was content chipping it to get 320 HP... the radio whizzbang was a bonus 🙂

  5. This is a wild guess, but I think that the appearance of RDS info finally being broadcast, probably correlates an incredible amount with stations ripping their songs to hard disk, computer based cueing systems, as opposed to cart players, turntables and CD. When a DJ was still popping in a cart, or playing a disc, that info was not being broadcast, even if the playlist was pretty much written in stone and highly set up ahead of time already. It is just that the info was not tied to the song itself, until the song was ripped to AAC MP3 or whatever.

  6. my car stez has RDS. im also used to looking down at my cd display to see the song names of of my burnt cd's now im using my itrip 100% of the time all i can see is 100.5 or what ever. i want RDS to recognise my ID3 tags and give me the info from mp3s. surely some one out there can make a software plugin for the itrip to do this!!

    if any one knows plz drop me a line.