I use Waze on my iPhone 4. I have a car stereo with Bluetooth.
My stereo’s bluetooth operates differently depending on whether the incoming stream is A2DP or Handsfree/Headset bluetooth “profile”.
If the profile is A2DP, then I select it as an input (like choosing FM, AM, Aux, CD, etc.) and I hear the audio stream continuously through my speakers. If I have another input selected (e.g., FM or CD), then I do not hear the A2DP audio stream.
If the profile is Headset or Handsfree (I’m not sure which one), then the audio stream interrupts whatever input is otherwise selected. This is how phone calls work. Interestingly, this is also how voicemail from my iPhone is transmitted.
Is it possible for Waze to send its audio over Headset or Handsfree profile, instead of just injecting it into the iPhone’s audio stream? If so, I could select and play any input on my car stereo, and get it interrupted by Waze’s voice prompts, dings, etc.
What I have to do now is select the A2DP input on my car stereo and then play some audio from the iPhone such as Pandora or iTunes, which will then get interrupted by the Waze prompts.
Something like to m-dennie happens to me, I use my iPhone connected to my car radio through the radio cable. Everytime waze makes a sound (alerts or navigation instructions), it stops the music in the radio and waze uses the iphone speaker for them. After that, the music continues on my radio, but generally turns annoying and I have to turn off the waze navigator.
Maybe is possible that waze, before make the sound, ask to iOS which one is the output in use and merges the sounds with the music…
Waze over bluetooth does not work properly (using iPhone/iPad). The way it ~should~ be working (presuming the phone is paired and connected to the vehicle or BT headset) is simply by “interrupting” the audio with turn-by-turn instructions. As it is currently implemented, Waze only announces over bluetooth if the iPhone is already in a call and thus connected to the BT receiver. Waze will properly interrupt with a turn instruction, but only if the phone is already engaged with the receiver/car/speaker headset.
The way it ~should~ be implemented is like the way iPhone and most other mature GPS apps function, buy initiating a BT connection and making an announcement when there is a need to do so, and then releasing the BT connection.
In other words, if my iPhone is paired with my car and I happen to be listening to the radio, if Waze needs to make an announcement, it should chirp in, make the announcement, and go away.
As it’s currently implemented, it’s all or nothing. Either Waze will announce over the iphone/ipad’s internal speaker, or announce over bluetooth if I’m already in a bluetooth related event (like a call or using Pandora over bluetooth).
I suspect this is simply something to do with the way Waze has chosen to implement bluetooth and not a mature feature possibly due to the limitations of the developers responsible for implementing bluetooth in Waze. I’m sure you/they/Waze can do this properly. Look at the way Motion-X works and see how they will seamlessly announce over bluetooth regardless of whether I’m in a call or not (more than likely I’m not), and then go away so I can get back to listening to my car’s radio. This is proper implementation. Would like to see this in a future update.
I’d like to add a vote for more configurability here. The problems people are describing here are similar to what I’m encountering with an iPhone 4S running iOS 5.1, and from what I can tell by reading – I’m no expert – the problem seems to center around (hidden) disagreements between the phone and the car head unit about which (not-user-selectable-from-the-phone) bluetooth profile to use.
There’s lots of blame to go around here, but the bottom line is that it would be great if Waze allowed you to select which bluetooth profile it uses, and even greater if iOS would let the user select which profile to use with particular BT connections. I believe this is actually do-able on jailbroken phones.
As it is, it seems as though people are using a lot of workarounds, but none covers my case – the need to have music playing through the head unit (either from CD or radio or attached device) interrupted by Waze prompts, on a head unit that supports only HSP and HFP profiles.
So, after all that, I found a workaround. Here’s the skinny:
Head unit: Alpine CDE-126BT . Supports only HFP and HSP.
Phone: iPhone 4S, running iOS 5.1
Setup: phone paired with head unit using bluetooth; iPod cabled to Alpine unit via their iPod interface cable (not the USB port, but that wouldn’t make any difference for this purpose)
Solution: purchase A2DPBlocker application from App Store. Sadly, it doesn’t run in the background, so the solution is to first start Waze, then A2DPBlocker.
A2DP blocker will insist on being given a playlist or queue because it assumes that your purpose is to stream music to non-A2DP headsets or whatever. That’s fine – just do that and then kill A2DPBlocker’s internal volume control.