Sirius XM
 

Is this available through the head unit without android or apple car play?

Sirius XM is a satellite system that has nothing to do with either Carplay nor Auto.
It will however require a subscription after whatever the free trial period is.

This may be informative.

https://vaistech.com/satellite-any-car/

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Cool thank you for answering. I have it on my car now I wanted to see if transferring to a GR was possible. I just wasn’t sure if it was built into the head unit

Activate it for a month, then cancel for 2 months. You'll get about 200 flyers in that 2 months to re-enable your subscription for varying deals.

I can confirm this. There's even endless threads on Reddit about how to continually resubscribe for the introductory rate.

What I can't figure out is why Sirius XM believes, exclusively, that in order to compete with things like Pandora and Spotify they have to be "different" and have absolutely inane and infuriately chatty DJ's on every channel.

If I could hop in my car and, without connecting my phone, listen to randomized music from a variety of genres I'd probably pay a monthly subscription for that. Because I already pay for that with Pandora's premium service that I have to connect my phone to use, and use data (or the less-random offline feature).

When we bought my wife's car a few years back it came with a Sirius XM trial. We listened for a few weeks and then just used Android Auto from then on. I see the same thing happening with the GR86. I'm already sick to death of the decades-past-relevance DJs talking about everything except "that was X, up next is Y".

i used to subscribe to XM back when they competed with each other, and then xmsirius, within the first 2 years of the merger.

at first, it was somewhat worthwhile, as xm music channels were commercial free, and almost no dj's either. but no station played more than 20 songs of any of their respective genre-- which is my biggest pet peeve of radio.. a 'classic rock' station that spans 30 years of music, and they can distill all that down to 20 songs?!?

the dj's entered the picture around the merger, and commercials shortly after. the commercials were really bad at first-- they only signed 2 advertisers so every single commercial break only had those 2 ad's on repeat...

now, the only advantage to satellite radio is the fact that one doesn't need to change the station to drive across the country. but it's still listening to the same 10 songs.


of course, i gave up on pandora as well-- i've got 3 different pandora accounts, each of which i attempted different techniques to find new music. they all ended up playing the same 50 songs...

Not sure what year you have but the 2020 has exactly that feature for Sirius. You give it a pool of stations and it randomly plays from each.

Forgot about that. Yeah, they still have ads. For other SiriusXM channels.

W. T. F.

Yes, I'm aware I could change the channel. I'm aware there are other stations. You don't make more money if I use more channels, so why in the FLUFF are you wasting my time trying to sell me on something I already pay for? Shut up and play the next song. FFS.

Yeah, this is why I end up building playlists and just running those through the phone. I haven't really found a great way to do that, but I can at least do things like pull my entire discography of a given band off my media server, delete all the "non-driving" songs, and then dump that into a playlist.

I've built a few multi-hour playlists over the years. It's not perfect, but it's better than the alternatives.

the point of any music service to me is to locate new music styled like that which i've already indicated i like. the premise of pandora appealed to this concept. i really have no idea how it goes so wrong. it took me 3 accounts to figure it out. all started with the same recommendations. first, i thumb-upped everything i liked. down to 50 songs. 2nd account, i thumb-downed everything i disliked. same 50 songs. last i just let it play everything. never skipped, never liked/disliked. and it still arrived at about 60 of the same songs that time.

i've been told that if i work really hard to curate a spotify playlist, it'll do that. but if i'm working hard at it, i don't need an intelligent web service.

Interesting. Got an offer to subscribe, a couple of months free then $23.99/month; if my wife keeps this car 16 years too, heading towards $4600+ to listen to the radio. We can buy a lot of CD's for that, or succumb to sticking files on a thumb drive. I did a live chat with Sirius XM and asked for deals, there's a program at $107.99 for 12 months, then regular pricing. I forsee endless annual friction with them with cancelling and renewing... :(

Not a fan of satellite, tried it in another rig and let it lapse. We did find a comedy channel at that time that had someone on that made us laugh so hard on the gravel travel we had to stop.

I just use Spotify, paid subscription, any more as I create my playlists and listen to whatever I want without any commercials. Works great with the car play systems. Our tow rig has both since we have varying phones in the house.

Entirely music for my car, my commute isn't long enough for podcasts or audio books long format media.

You should never have to pay full price for SXM. When we were using it, I was able to consistently renew it for $5 to $6/Month by talking to a live agent.

That said, I'm surprised they maintain their high cost. It's just not worth it even at the $70 or so per year.