Android 11 (Sony Xperia 5 II) and UConnect 8.4 not playing nice

[Black-Wolf]

HI all: Ran into an issue (it's an annoyance, but not a show stopper). Backstory: I recently was forced to upgrade my older Samsung Galaxy S9 because the battery swelled up to the point it looked like a fat hippo and broke the case... yeah... Still ran great, but - I didn't trust it to not melt down. So, I did a lot of research, and wound up buying a Sony Xperia 5 II - directly from Sony (I never buy from the carrier - their stuff is always locked and they load tons of bloatware on it that I don't want, need, and will just have to go through tons of frustration trying to remove it). I love the phone. 5G (LTE) on AT&T - no issues - just swapped the sim from my old phone to the new one. Phone is great, and is water resistant (more than the Samsung). I drive a 2017 (4th Gen) RAM 1700 with the 8" screen and Uconnect for reference with the issue.

Issue: Now that I have the new phone in my greedy little paws, I connected it to my UConnect with Bluetooth. When I start to play music through the system, the song title, artist, and album initially display for about 1/2 a second, then one of several things happens: Either the title and album show "unknown" or: they show the previous or next song's title and album, which doesn't match of course, what is currently playing. If I skip the track to the next track, or go back at least two tracks and then forward one, the title, artist, and album show correctly - usually. More frustratingly, I have also noticed that Voice Recognition is not working as well as it used to. For example: with my older phone connected via BT, I could say "Call HGR" and Uconnect would reply and call the contact labled "HGR". Now when I say this with the new phone, Uconnect gives me some off the wall contact I wasn't asking for at all, that's not even close to sounding like "HGR"...

Digging around in my phone's developer options, I found that there are several setting for Bluetooth that might be cause for the issues I'm experiencing so I'm going to make a few changes and see how that affects things:

Change 1: Change Bluetooth AVRCP version from 1.6 back to 1.4 (default). Other options are 1.3, annd 1.5
Change 2: Change the Bluetooth MAP version from 1.4 to to 1.2 (default). Other option is 1.3 for MAP. Will try the alternates if that doesn't work.
Change 3: Update my Uconnect firmware. I'm doing this 3rd because I don't have time tonight, and you need about 30 minutes of not doing jack but sitting there waiting for it to do its thing... :/
Change 4: Enable Gabeldorshe Feature stack (this is only on Android 11 phones with the developer options enabled). This probably won't help, as older BT devices use the Floride stack, and it may be incompatible with the stack in the Uconnect system - meaning it either won't do anything, or it won't allow the phone to connect. Here's a little more info on Gabeldorshe if you're interested: https://9to5google.com/2020/02/19/android-11-dp1-gabeldorsche-bluetooth/ I can't find the tech specs or better details at the moment about this feature stack yet, but I'll be digging into it for sure. Also, this may have to be turned BACK ON every time you restart the phone - making it worthless even if it does fix the issue since I typically restart my phone every few weeks... :/

I also have options to change the Bluetooth Audio Codec, BT Audio Sample Rate, BT Audio Bits Per Sample, and BT Audio Channel mode, but there's nothing underneath these menu items to change - Just "Use System Selection". I assume there are settings or software I can try to figure out if my first two changes don't fix the issue.

If anyone has any suggestions on how to fix either the Voice Recognition or the Audio display issues, I'm all eyes (I mean ears)... but you can't "hear" a post...

Thanks!

V/R

BlackWolf

 

[Black-Wolf]

"Change 1: Change Bluetooth AVRCP version from 1.6 back to 1.4 (default). Other options are 1.3, annd 1.5, and Change 2: Change the Bluetooth MAP version from 1.4 to to 1.2 (default). Other option is 1.3 for MAP." did not fix the issue.
Moving on to Change 3.

 

[jejb]

Hope you get it working. FWIW, I am running Android 11 on my Samsung Note 20 and I do not have the above issues with my 18's uConnect system.

 

[Black-Wolf]

Well, change 3: Updating the UConnect Firmware did not fix the issue either.

Also, I verified that Gabeldorshe Feature stack has to be turned back on every time the phone is restarted - so, no help there - and it didn't fix the issue at all.

What DOES seem to have fixed the screen display for the currently playing track, was switching from the YouTube Music app, to the Amazon Music App. I've found it plays better, sounds better, and has a better radomization algorithm than YouTube does. It also seems to be able to stream better even in areas where there's little cell signal. So this appears to be a YouTube Music issue more than anything else...

Voice recognition through UConnect still seems to be screwed up some, as noted before... :/ - so on to that: I think it might be that VR needs to be retrained somehow... either in the phone or in UConnect... Wondering if they made changes to the VR code? Anyone know if the UConnect Software can be hacked? I believe it's just a specialized version of Linux... Hmm...

 

[Black-Wolf]

So, I narrowed it down: it is an issue with the YouTube (formerly Google) Music App - it somehow either is sending data too fast to the radio head unit, or its data is being dropped/ignored by the head unit during initialization of the labeling on the screen. Once the music is playing, and it moves on to another song, it's fine and recovers. Switching out of the bluetooth player mode on the radio head unit, and then back into it, causes the issue to reappear until the next song plays.

When I switched from YouTube to Amazon Music App, the issue completely disappeared.

Hopefully someone will find this useful/helpful.

For now, I've switched all my music over to Amazon, and even figured out how to get it to play on my GoogleHome.

V/R

Black-Wolf