Help Please DAB just vanished!!!!

So my Dad drove my A4 B8.5 (2014) a couple days ago, he had played around with the radio settings as when I came back it was on one of the frequency wavebands. Didn't think much of it but went back to my favourites and selected my saved DAB radio station, all was normal, the station worked fine. However, the volume was too loud so I decided to adjust it, this is when the problem started. Instead of the volume getting adjusted I got the volume bar displayed and "currently unavailable", I tried to turn the MMI on and off and the car too, but it just was not having it, it would not let me adjust the volume.

So I went into the radio list and picked another radio station, there I could adjust the volume fine. So I then went back to the favourites DAB station and still same problem, cannot adjust volume. Then I thought maybe if I add the station manually back into the favourites it will fix the problem.

So I pressed the "Waveband" button and lo and behold, the "DAB" option has vanished!!!! I can no longer search for new DAB stations, I can only play existing DAB stations in my favourites and cannot adjust the volume on them .

Anyone had this happen to them before? How can I fix this? I am completely surprised that such a thing is even possible, the DAB radio stations work perfectly fine but it simply does not let me find new ones or adjust the volume anymore. It's like the software has confused itself and will no longer display DAB options.

Ok finally got it back!

This problem has been present for the last two days and would not go away. I proceeded to jump back in the car after posting this and went into the MMI main menu and in there ran a factory reset on the radio. Tried the radio again and still no luck in getting the DAB option back. So feeling defeated I went back indoors and had a shower. Afterwards I thought I would run an ODB scan to see if there was some sort of hardware failure, jumped back in the car and the DAB option magically appeared again .

Was starting to get worried as I was reading online that someone with an A3 had the same problem and Audi could not even fix it with a software reset so they proceeded to replace the entire MMI unit (at a potential cost of £2000+).

rum4mo said:

Did you scan it with VCDS or similar VW Group specific scan tool to see if anything had been logged?

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I don't have anything as fancy as VCDS, just a Bluetooth OBD scanner which I used and came back with no logged faults.

Really odd behaviour to be honest, I'm surprised something like this can even happen (and a simple reboot doesn't fix it).

Andrew Myers said:

Hi I've just got exactly the same problem as you. My stored DAB stations are accessible but I can't alter any volume so I have to go to an FM station change the volume and then go back. If I look in the Frequency list the DAB stations are not available. If I try to access DAB via voice control it says the function is not available. The car is in for a service and Cam belt change in two weeks which they tend to update the software at the same time so I'll see if that clears it. Did the problem come back or has it been ok since?

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Yep, that's pretty much exactly what I had.

The problem did come back once since I posted this, it lasted for about a day and this time around I did nothing at all (i.e. no factory reset), I just lived with it and it magically fixed itself again after some time.

Makes me think either the units are buggy / faulty or there is some temporary DAB outage when it occurs.