Right steering wheel button toggle Slacker stations

I agree that would be a cool feature - it would be great and safer to change Slacker stations without using the touch screen

clx said:

Hi everyone - every once a while, I noticed that when I press the right scroll button on the steering wheel, the Slacker radio changes to the next favorite station. But most of the time, the same button only toggles adding / removing the station to / from favorites. Has anyone else experienced this?

I think cycling / changing stations with that button is much more useful than toggling the station as favorites, but it feels like this is only happening when the system is acting weird once a while.

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Most of the time it just toggles the favorite status, which is very odd behavior IMHO. Why would marking a channel as a favorite warrant a steering wheel control?

When it removes it from the favorites, it frequently moves to the next favorite, which is why at first I thought it was a "go to nex"t button. It took me a while to figure out why my favorites lists kept getting trashed.

I wish it would just go to the next slacker favorite. That seems like a simple and logical thing to do from the steering wheel.

Absolutely! I've only had my Tesla for a day and I'm already aggravated at how difficult it is to switch between favorites, both in Slacker and in XM. In both cases, the scroll wheel should absolutely switch between favorites, not toggle their favorites status on and off. Toggling is an ability that should by no means be on the steering wheel.

I need to get on the ball here! I haven't tried just "clicking" the right scroll wheel button. I have done that to the left in order to pause. I guess I need to play around more. BTW, I really wish Tesla would have the steering wheel buttons ignore a click within 0.5 s of a scroll wheel turn. I can't tell you how many times a song I really like comes on Slacker, I go to raise the volume while driving, and accidentally also skip the remainder of the song!

Ahhhh!

So now I know why one of my favorite stations went away. I guess I clicked on the right scroll wheel. Thanks for the heads up and I agree. This is not the best UI. Also wish Pandora would be supported, but, thats a whole other thread

Does anyone know what use case they were trying to solve with this behavior? Like others have said, I thought it was taking me to my next favorite station...until I realized it was also deleting them out as I went. I just don't get its purpose...

Geoff said:

Does anyone know what use case they were trying to solve with this behavior? Like others have said, I thought it was taking me to my next favorite station...until I realized it was also deleting them out as I went. I just don't get its purpose...

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Designer working in lab vs. designer in field.

Geoff said:

Does anyone know what use case they were trying to solve with this behavior? Like others have said, I thought it was taking me to my next favorite station...until I realized it was also deleting them out as I went. I just don't get its purpose...

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It just a really horrible use of a limit resource on the steering wheel.

I cannot figure out why would anyone make favorite tagging (or "favorite list destruction", as I refer to it) easier to do than station selection?

I set a favorite once in a blue moon, but I change channels/stations nearly ever time I drive.

The function of toggling a station as a favorite is even worse than described in the case of XM stations.

For XM, the favorites list as well as the 6 station presets are kind of tied together. If you tune to an XM station, and then press and hold a preset position on the 17" screen, it adds that station as a preset, and ALSO adds it to your favorites list. Which is nice.

However this sets up two problems:

1) If you're listening to that station, and click the right scroll wheel, the "toggle favorites" function removes the station from your favorites list and ALSO removes it from the 6 presets, leaving the preset button unassigned.

2) Clicking the right scroll wheel again will add the station back to the favorites list, but NOT to the presets.

On XM, the track skip buttons above & below the left scroll wheel will cycle through your presets, but of course if you accidentally remove a preset with the click of the right scroll wheel, it's gone and you can't cycle through it until you bring up the Media app and add it back to your presets.

Please send feedback via the official Owner Feedback page to encourage them to fix!

I often use the right-scroll-wheel to close the pano-roof by clicking the wheel and am irked every time I end up deleting a station from favorites.

Tip: If you're quick enough, you can re-favorite the station before it moves to the next favorite (at the risk of un-favoriting that one too...). You can also recover your favorite by going into the Tunein/Slacker station list and your old favorite will usually still be in the "Favorites" folder.

SomeJoe7777 said:

The function of toggling a station as a favorite is even worse than described in the case of XM stations.

For XM, the favorites list as well as the 6 station presets are kind of tied together. If you tune to an XM station, and then press and hold a preset position on the 17" screen, it adds that station as a preset, and ALSO adds it to your favorites list. Which is nice.

However this sets up two problems:

1) If you're listening to that station, and click the right scroll wheel, the "toggle favorites" function removes the station from your favorites list and ALSO removes it from the 6 presets, leaving the preset button unassigned.

2) Clicking the right scroll wheel again will add the station back to the favorites list, but NOT to the presets.

On XM, the track skip buttons above & below the left scroll wheel will cycle through your presets, but of course if you accidentally remove a preset with the click of the right scroll wheel, it's gone and you can't cycle through it until you bring up the Media app and add it back to your presets.

Click to expand...

This same behavior is also apparent with the radio function. And be careful how you program favorites. 96.1 standard, HD channel 1, HD channel 2, and HD channel 3 are four DIFFERENT favorites (standard and HD 1 may actually be one preset. But it will only ever show station name in the preset if you added it while on HD). Pissed me off enough that I set them all to standard, which auto-tunes HD, and just never listen to the substations because the next/previous button starts at front of the presets since HD channel 2 and 3 aren't favorited!

fact200 said:

Please send feedback via the official Owner Feedback page to encourage them to fix!

I often use the right-scroll-wheel to close the pano-roof by clicking the wheel and am irked every time I end up deleting a station from favorites.

Tip: If you're quick enough, you can re-favorite the station before it moves to the next favorite (at the risk of un-favoriting that one too...).

Click to expand...

I too have just discovered this annoying UI "feature" where pressing the right scroll wheel un-favorites a Slacker station. I was wondering how they were getting deleted!
Seems to me an illogical action for this scroll wheel button - meanwhile there seems to be no way from the steering wheel to advance to the next favorite Slacker stations (like how in most cars with radio controls on the steering wheel you can advance to the next radio preset). Or if there's a way to do that, how??

fact200 said:

[...] You can also recover your favorite by going into the Tunein/Slacker station list and your old favorite will usually still be in the "Favorites" folder.

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I noticed this too. here's a related question:
When you favorite a Slacker station, it seems to be put into two separate places. Once is the car's list of favorites, where it includes AM, FM, Slacker favorites all together in one scrolling list. It's from this list that stations get deleted by the scroll wheel. But as mentioned in the tip above, there's another separate favorites folder that seems to belong to the Slacker app itself, in the Internet->Slacker->Favorite Stations section. These seem to persist even if you delete the favorite with the scroll wheel. My question: what if you WANT to delete the ones in this separate Slacker favorites list? there seems to be no way to manually delete them there. or will they eventually go away by themselves if you've deleted the corresponding favorite in the other area?

f-stop said:

My question: what if you WANT to delete the ones in this separate Slacker favorites list? there seems to be no way to manually delete them there. or will they eventually go away by themselves if you've deleted the corresponding favorite in the other area?

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+1 I'd like to know how to clean this up as well. Tried everything.

I've been struggling with this same issue for a while. Just recently also discovered the issue of why favorites kept dropping out of the list. Anyway, I contacted my local service center (and referenced this thread in fact). Here is the response:

"***went out to a vehicle in the shop and function tested the steering wheel controls. What you are describing is a normal function. During your appointment we will definitely go over all the functions of the steering wheel buttons.

Have a great weekend!"

The service center people are very nice. I can't understand how this is a normal feature though. I requested that Tesla engineers take a look at this as this is not a good feature. Perhaps you can also provide similar feedback to Tesla.

Thanks.

further observation... I've noticed that these favorites in the Internet->Slacker->Favorite Stations don't eventually go away by themselves. I deleted all the favorites in the other area (where AM/FM stns etc are saved) and un-highlighted the heart marking those stations several weeks ago, and four of the old favorites still persist in the Slacker area. No clue why those particular 4 persist, and there seems no way to delete them manually. Seems like a bug (or at very least, poor UI design)