[Music]
Welcome to the Grok Shop! In this
video I'll show how to improve your in-
car Pandora music streaming experience.
So, the configuration that this applies
to is if you're running Pandora on your
phone and you might select Pandora on
your stereo but it still talks to your
phone to run Pandora on the phone which
streams the data via bluetooth to your
car. So, of course, the way this is
supposed to work is: you come to your car
start your car, select Pandora on your
stereo, and then the Bluetooth to the
phone is connected and the app is
started remotely on the phone and
everything
just takes off without a hitch. What you
may find though, is things sometimes don't
always work quite so smoothly and it
appears to be a fault with the Pandora
app itself. There's different versions
that work better than others, believe it
or not and we'll get into that more here
in a minute. So, for example, here in my
Honda Odyssey you can see it says "no data"
and this is basically a state it'll
be stuck in. I'll have to manually exit
out to the radio and come back to
Pandora and that may work also if I
start Pandora manually and sort of tee
it up before I select Pandora on the
stereo that sometimes will get it to
work but of course who wants to go
through all these manual machinations
every single time you get in your car
right?
so the solution that I found is
basically twofold. The first part of the
solution is to get a more reliable
version of Pandora so we'll first delete
or uninstall the existing Pandora
next to prevent Pandora from sending you
another faulty app will want to disable
automatic app update so just go to the
Google Play Store clicking on the
hamburger icon here and then scroll down
to settings and in here you'll see
auto-update apps make sure it's set to
do not auto-update apps okay next we
want to configure the permission to
allow side loading which is loading of
apps not through the Play Store onto
your device in Android 7.1 you go to
settings and lock screen and security
and then you'll see a setting for
unknown sources we want to make sure
that slid to beyond now how far Android
8 9 and beyond there is no more global
setting for unknown sources so instead
you have to set it per app so go to your
settings apps and notifications and then
at the bottom advanced and special app
access at the very bottom there and then
we're going to go to the install unknown
apps option so now we'll just enable it
for Chrome or whatever browser you use
I'm going to use chrome here and slide
it over allow from this source okay so
now I have to decide which version to
install I just want to point out if you
go to old version comm there are many
old versions of Pandora here I don't
know which one of these will provide a
better connection over Bluetooth
probably all of them are better than the
current version but I didn't try any of
these because I found another version
and I'll share this link below that does
solve the problem it is a patched
version it's a patched version of 8.6
Pandora someone's modified it so it
shows no ads and you can download music
but this probably won't last forever
they'll probably disable it at some
point if they do disable it I'll do some
more research find another app that
works and I'll post up a link to that in
the description or in the comments below
so now you just want to get your link to
your phone you can email it to yourself
or text it to yourself however you like
to do it or open it if you're on your
phone already into your browser and then
once it downloads click open if it
doesn't open when you click open just go
to your notifications area and then tap
on the APK that downloaded there let the
deeps can finish and once it's done
you'll get a prompt do you really really
want to install it does not require any
special access which is cool just click
install of course now you can go ahead
and click open and then you're gonna
have to real aughh in so hopefully you
remember your login for Pandora
okay now with your new old version of
Pandora installed and working good you
want to go back to your unknown sources
setting and depending on what version of
androids you have to flip those settings
to off just to be nice safe and secure
so now before I go on I just want to
make you aware that besides the global
disabling of Auto updates which is here
there's also a setting on a per app
basis so if you wanted to turn this back
on and keep all your other apps updated
except for Pandora then you just go into
the Google Play Store go to Pandora and
uncheck enable auto update here then of
course you can go back to your global
setting and set that to allow auto
updates I'm probably just over Wi-Fi is
what I would recommend okay if you're
still having problems after changing out
your Pandora app you might want to try
this macro droid trick if you've seen
some of my other videos you know I'm a
big micro droid fan it actually helped
solve the volume problem that we were
having in Android for so long so to help
this issue what I did was modified the
connect music macro which is where I
connect via bluetooth or headset and
what I wanted to do here was to keep
what I was doing before which was
modified the volume so it's at a hundred
percent volume no attenuation then I
want to launch Pandora and I want to
keep an existing if it's asleep so if I
have music that's paused or something
it'll pick up where I left off and then
I want to disable Wi-Fi because
sometimes when you handoff from Wi-Fi to
Cellular when you pull out of your
driveway that can cause a hiccup but I
only want to do it if it's connected via
bluetooth to my car so I put this
constraint on there and then I want to
put it to sleep for 10 minutes and then
I'll rename all the Wi-Fi ten minutes
later so that gives me time to get out
of my driveway and gets my Wi-Fi back on
before I get to most destinations and
here you can see how I configured the
Bluetooth constraint
you want to select device connected and
then it'll show you a list of Bluetooth
devices that you've connected to the
hands-free link is the only car I've got
setup for right now of course you can
add more devices by using or condition
for that constraint mmm okay so yeah now
time to test it all out moment of truth
will he won't he oh look uh uh hey there
we go
[Music]
so that test went pretty well which is
starting out from off and going straight
into Pandora I'll do another test here
starting out in radio mode and switching
over to Pandora
[Music]
so yeah I'm pretty pleased with the
results I hope this helps you guys out
if I come up with any more tricks or
ideas I'll post them up here and/or
produce a new video the hats on it's
done
thanks for watching
[Music]