FM Radio Recent Songs List empty

Happy to clear it up. There are two kinds of tagging:

• RT (Radio Tagging) - This is what you see in grey scrolling letters. It is just a stream of text from the radio station. There is NO WAY for the iPod to know what text is the music title or the artist. You will often find that this text scrolls the station ID along with other stuff. If this is all you are seeing, then nothing will be added to your "Songs Heard" list, etc. There is just no way for your iPod to figure anything out from this information.
• RT+ (Radio Tagging Plus) - This is information that the station transmits as an actual tag. In other words, it is not just a stream of text, but text with an ID associated with it. So for instance, in an RT+ stream, the iPod gets a stream that first tells it what the data it is getting is. So it gets the equivalent of "The name of the song currently playing is:" then the name of the song. Same goes for artist name. THIS is what the iPod needs to give you a list of recent songs and to favorite a song. When the iPod is getting this kind of signal, you will get the name of the song in bright white letters above the RT scrolling info (If there is any). You will also see the icon appear to favorite the song. Here is an image to demonstrate:

Notice the name of the song in bright white, below that is the RT text stream. Above the song title is the artist name. Then in the lower left is the button to favorite the song. If the radio station is transmitting in RT+, this is what you will see.

If you connected to itunes, then the ipod will erase all recent songs. So listen for a while and wait for a couple songs to be idebtified on the nano screen. Then try going to recent songs. If you reset it you will loose all recent songs!

Perhaps if we take a step beyond the lingo and talk about it more in terms of what it actually does depending on what the radio station is feeding it.

If you are getting a signal from a station that only supports the most basic type of service, you will get the scrolling line all by itself. In the picture above, that is the line that has "....Hits today. Classics....", in it. As far as your ipod is concerned, this is just text. It cannot do anything with it but display it. There is nothing in that data to tell the nano what information is in that text. Call it what you like, but that is what it is. If all you get when you are tuned to a station is that line, you will not get anything saved into your "recent songs" list. Some stations won't even give you that line of text.

However, stations that transmit with truly "tagged" data - in other words, there is a signal that identifies the text by labeling some if it as "Artist" and some of it as "Title" - then you will see the actual song name, "Like a Rolling Stone" in the example above and artist, "Bob Dylan" in the example above. When the nano gets this data, formatted in this way and with the tags, you will get things showing up in your "Recent Songs" screen. You will also see the icon in the lower left that lets you tag it as a favorite song. However, the bottom line here is that if you do not see the name of the song and the artist as shown in the example above, then the nano is NOT getting enough info to figure out what the artist and song are.

Many people make the mistake of thinking that if they are getting the "....Hits today. Classics....", that the ipod should be able to know what song is playing because stations will often have the name of the song in that scrolling text. However, this is NOT the case. If you don't get the artist and title above the scrolling text, then your iPod has NO IDEA what the name and artist of the current song is - no matter what it says in the scrolling text. The only way the nano can show you recent or favorite song is if it got that artist and title information.

Finally, if there is no icon in the lower left of the screen as show above, you also know that the ipod is not getting enough information to know the artist name and song title If it was, it would show you that icon.

i

Ok, all I can say is that if I see the icon appear in the lower left and I see the name of the song and I see the artist - in the position seen above, those songs will show up in the recent list for me.

If I do not see all of those things, or ONLY see the grey line of text right above the station number (which may say the artist and song info in it), that song will NOT end up in the "Recent Songs" list.

i

most radio stations do not support tagging songs - and if a radio station doesn't support tagging songs, then it won't show up on on recent songs either. i haven't found a radio station that supports this yet and i've had my ipod for over a year and a half.

Olly1999 is right, it may say it does. But only stations that support tagging will show in the recent! If you see a song on your screen w/ the little tag symbol next to it, and then not in your recent songs list, then something is wrong! The recent songs feature can not be disabled. If you are having trouble, you may want to take it to your local apple store! Or by emailing them!

Of course it requires that that station support tagging. How else would you expect the the Nano to know what the song is? In fact, it not only needs to support radio tagging (RT), I believe it needs to support RT+.

Without tagging there is NO WAY for the nano to know the name of the song.

In my experience, even for the stations that do supposedly support RT, they don't always have it turned on correctly or their RT+ data does not always update. I had a station yesterday where the RT+ data indicated the same song over the entire afternoon.

I am finding that radio stations are not being very consistent in even when they have it on. One day a station seems to have it, then the next it is like it is turned off.

i

Hi.... Thanks for all the information. Seeing this back-and-forth has been helpful. I have just gotten my nano gen 6 today and experienced the same issue with the FM radio and the "Recent Songs" list, which I also understood to operate seperately from the tag. In my case, it seems that it is working.... that is sometimes. I can see the scrolling song title, and sometimes but not everytime I will then see the song listed in the "Recent Songs" list, without me pressing any tag. I've not yet seen a tag I can press, so I can be sure about that. It seems this feature is not very reliable. I have 4 songs listed there now, but I've probably listened to more than double that in full songs with the scrolling operating too.

Yes it does say this but it seems to be the case that you need to be able to tag songs - I'll do some research into it!!!