[F4LL0U7]

I joined this forum to try to find a solution to this issue. It is truly maddening. I use Android Auto, and so I have absolutely no need for the radio at all, not even Sirius. But whenever I turn the car on or off, the audio defaults to Sirius.

I thought I could fix the problem by calling up Sirius and cancelling the trial. But the joke was on me, because now instead of hearing the Sirius radio stream, all I hear is a never-ending promo telling me to subscribe to Sirius. I hear this every single time I turn on or off my car. It absolutely ruins the otherwise fantastic experience of driving a 2019 Forester.

Does anyone know how I can disable the radio without having to manually turn down the volume / turn off the head unit / change media sources every time I turn the car on or off? Preferably without pulling out the head unit and ripping out the radio antenna...

 

[F4LL0U7]

not its prowess for delivering fancy in-cabin tech

Thanks for the reply. The thing is, the 2019 Forester has tons of fancy in-cabin tech. This is literally the only problem I've noticed. They definitely put a lot of thought and hard work into every other aspect of the vehicle and driving experience. The only exception is the radio issue.

I found a partial solution by plugging an audio cable into the AUX port, and selecting that as my audio source. I didn't need to plug the audio cable into anything else. In fact, once I realized that this improved the issue, I plugged in a small audio adapter in order to take less space.

Basically, I think the concept is that if the head unit detects there's an audio source besides the radio, it will default to that. The improvement is that when I turn on the car, I can do so in blissful silence. AUX seems to be selected by default when starting up the car. However, when turning off the car, the Sirius promo continues to play.

Next I'm going to see if I can burn an audio CD of complete silence, and just leave that in the disc drive. Maybe that will supersede all other audio sources.

 

[F4LL0U7]

Just a couple of things based on troubleshooting I did last night.

make sure that "Tune Start" is disabled

"Tune Start" was already disabled in my SXM settings. Toggling it on and off again did nothing to improve the issue with Sirius playing automatically whenever I turn on or off the car.

What DID work, and has continued to work after turning the car on and off several times over the past 12 hours was this:

Pull up Sirius on the head unit and navigate to their channel listing. Tap on Channel 0, which is apparently the radio ID or something like that. You should hear nothing but blissful silence. Leave your radio tuned to SXM Ch. 0, and to be extra safe, set your first radio preset as that channel. Since I don't use the radio at all, I set it as every single radio preset.

Now you can connect your phone, USB, AUX, or whatever other input you'd like and listen as you normally would. When you turn off the car and your audio source of choice disconnects, the car will still automatically pull up the radio again, but it will be SXM Ch. 0 (silence!) instead of the SXM promo, static, or any other random radio station. Same thing when you turn the car back on again.

Does this work when using carplay or Android Auto?

Well, for me Car Play is hit or miss when connecting after I start the car. Typically it works however it is not 100%.

I use Android Auto, and it was also hit or miss for me when I first got the car, until I *might* have figured out how the car "prefers" to connect. I noticed that if I plugged my phone into the car before I started the car, it refused to connect properly. The phone will still connect via Bluetooth, but Android Auto refuses to launch.

I realized that if I turn the car on first (or at least turn it to accessory) so that the car and phone establish a Bluetooth connection first, then when I plug in the phone, Android Auto launches immediately with no issues.

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TL;DR:

1. Set your radio preset to SXM Ch. 0 if you want silence when you turn on/off the car.

2. Turn your car on and wait for Bluetooth to connect before plugging in your phone in order to avoid connectivity issues with Android Auto or Apple CarPlay.