K3 - Beeper still too loud (new AUDIO ALERTS) v1.524.2003.20
Completed
Since the device is also used in very quiet locations, a setting like the current one is not sufficient:
- very loud
- loud
- mute
better:
- loud (70 dB)
- normal (50 dB)
- quiet (30 dB)
- mute (0 dB)
much better:
- 5-10 volume levels
PLEASE check the current status,
this is a really important issue for the users!
We all love our Karoo 3, but we need a much better volume adjustment!
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I was very much looking forward to this update/release, because I returned my Karoo because of this annoyance some time ago and was excited enough to order a new one. I am reluctant to open the box and might just return the device again. This is so frustrating, because this essentially kills the radar being way too loud.
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First of all, thumbs up for the fact that development has tried to solve the problem of the loud beeper. Unfortunately, it didn't work out the way I had hoped. Instead of having less intrusive alerts when the radar detects a car or before an upcoming turn, I now have to listen to these multiple beeps as if a small band is practicing in my Karoo. Is it less loud now? I'm not sure, because it was a cold December day and I was wearing a hat over my ears, and it was still louder than I would have liked. Is it less annoying? Absolutely not, it's just annoying, just in a different way. I was cycling through my town on a Sunday with the radar unmuted (because there are more and more quiet e-vehicles) and I felt a little embarrassed by all the noise coming out of my Karoo.
To make matters worse, Hammerhead has for the first time included a radar clearing alert when a car has overtaken me and the car track sidebar turns green. Not a bad idea in itself, as some people will want that for sure, but it would be nice to have an option to turn it off (like the Garmins). In some situations with this feature the little band in the Karoo seems never stops playing (especially when the radar or its connection to the Karoo turns crazy, as it was the case last Sunday). I have never needed a clearance warning myself in the past, but I recognise that some do. Just give us the option to turn it off.
So it was possible to integrate new, different sounds into the Karoo. I wonder why it is not possible to just implement new, simple and less loud sounds. And then let us choose between three different profiles: loud, normal, quiet. There are situations on every ride where this flexibility would be very welcome. In our company we use barcode scanners with beepers (not speakers) where we can change the volume and frequency settings to high, medium or quiet by simply scanning a barcode. But maybe or probably the hardware needs to be prepared for this feature, so unfortunately it is too late for the Karoos in this regard.
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While I find the radar alert tone annoying in quieter situations, like riding through old town with other riders around me plus pedestrians, I also appreciate the loud volume and piercing tone when I'm out on the road with a headwind and traffic noise.
I would rather be annoyed at times (setting it to mute is easy) than miss a notifications when out on the road where there is a real danger from fast overtaking traffic.
So would it be feasible to create a second tone with a lower frequency, like a single "bong" rather than a sharp "ping"? And add a choice to the radar control screen, right below mute/unmute to switch from the pleasant, zen-like bong to the sharper "WATCH OUT" tone?
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For me it's not about the pitch or number of beeps. It's simply about the volume, or more specifically the lack of any volume control. I do not notice any volume change with new update. The beeper is still way too loud so I keep it turned off.
Thank you to the product team for listening to the community and attempting a software fix. Changing the tones, what does it mean in this context? It would be nice to have a definitive answer from Hammerhead. Just tell us "volume control is not possible due to hardware limitations" or "volume control should be possible, please be patient as we are looking into it".
I am no expert but my gut tells me volume control is not coming or it would have been offered or at least mentioned already. So now I'm considering foregoing the warranty and opening the unit to place a piece of foam over the beeper to dampen the volume. However, I do not know where the beeper is located or what it looks like and would not want to accidentally cover the barometer. Nor would I want to damage the watertight seal. Has anyone successfully opened and resealed their Karoo? Does anyone know of a teardown with photos for the Karoo 3? Thanks in advance!
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Hello,
Thank you for your feedback, although we are bummed to hear that you are still having issues with Audio Alerts.
As stated in our previous release notes where we announced these changes, I can confirm to you that the Karoo does NOT have a volume control. This is not possible on the current Karoo hardware. While we CANNOT control the volume, we can control the tone, frequency and thus the length of the audio alerts. The new tones are the same "volume" as the previous alerts, but we made changes to tone and frequency to make the perceived volume feel quieter and less harsh to the ear.
I am curious whether you are having issues with the alerts for all of the sound events, or are there specific sounds that bother you more than others when it comes to the volume? I'm also curious to hear more about what type of riding you are doing? The volume of our Audio Alerts are optimized for outdoor road riding where traffic and other environmental conditions factor in to ensure riders are always aware of audio alerts out on the road.
Looking forward to learning more about your current experiences. Thanks again for taking the time to provide feedback to us.
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If it's not possible to change the volume, can you give us some flexibilty do adapt the tones by ourselves and which alarms we want to hear in general? Personally, I am often riding in the nature, quiet surrounding, not many cars.. I think in this case it would be beneficial to have a tone that is as low as possible, which should be the most less intrusive option
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Thank you for the late but honest clarification about beeper loudness. In fact, this is an absolute deal breaker for me (it pretty much renders my radar useless because of the terrible sound level) and I returned my Karoo. I will not consider it any longer and stick to Wahoo. Very sad.
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I'm sure the product team has tried many alternatives, so perhaps this is a stupid question, anyway... While there's no native hardware volume control, would it be possible to use duty cycle (PWM) to control the intensity (volume) of the beeper?
For example, instead of having a 'long' tone of 5000Hz for 350ms, split that into several 'short' tones that are interlaced with off periods in between the tones.
While it will not be a perfect volume control, it might help mitigate the problem without introducing 'musical' tones. This trick was commonly used to control the intensity of Android phone vibrators before there was an option to set the amplitude explicitly.
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A member of the community has developed an extension to control the Radar sound, if interested you may try it: https://support.hammerhead.io/hc/en-us/community/posts/32482506884251
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I tested the Radar sound extension and it works great. A very good solution to me for the radar tones. It's really easy to install the app, and to configure and use it. Thank you Sergej for developing this! I no longer feel like I need to tear apart my unit to dampen the beeper.
It would be great to have a similar app for the turn-by-turn directions, adjusting frequency and duration of those tones would be quite useful. I still find these too long and high pitched, but I can live with.
Overall I'm glad I stuck with the Karoo, it's a great unit and the Hammerhead developers do a good job of pushing out regular updates. Thanks for giving us the really easy sideloading of user developed apps, this will really unlock the full potential of the device.
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With all due respect to the work of the developers of this or other extensions, I don't think this beeper issue should be handed over to external developers. And I wonder if this could be the future, where some long-standing complaints or feature requests are elegantly kind of passed on to third-party apps and extensions.
In my mind, the beeper problem should be solved by the Hammerhead development team, and I wonder why one person could come up with a seemingly simple working solution in such a short time that most of us wanted (just adjust the frequency and duration of the beeps) that the Hammerhead developers can't provide.
For my part, I don't need or want any third-party apps or extensions as I don't want to risk the system maybe not working properly after a firmware update. So I'm still waiting for the development team to come up with a working solution to the insanely loud beeps and am not using the Karoo at the moment. Without solution I might sell the device before the start of the spring season.
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Terrible to say, but this assures me that I did the right thing returning the Karoo. Still sad, because the SDK and its opportunities are awesome, but I want to have certain sounds, but the Karoo just has annoying loudness. If this (and a few other things) change in the feature, I'd immediately reconsider buying.
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Agree with the last comments. Having extensions for extra functionality is amazing! But pushing users to install random extensions to solve every basic product problem is not a great experience for such a 'premium' product.
Maybe changing the volume is indeed an hardware limitation. What about adding options to choose the beeps? Not just 'new' style sounds, but something a bit more custom, maybe I want a single beep for navigating on left turns and double beep to navigate to right turns or perhaps I want a long beep for radar, etc. If extensions can do it, why can't the native software? :)
Another good option to have is the ability to selectively enable/disable which sound alerts should play during rides. We can do that in the profile options, but not while riding. Could work in a similar way to the lights control UI, where we could select if we want navigation alerts, radar, notifications like battery/disconnects.
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Ali
- A member of the community has developed an extension to control the Radar sound, if interested you may try it: https://support.hammerhead.io/hc/en-us/community/posts/32482506884251
Interesting question: if a member of the customer team suggests to try an extension and then this extension damages my Karoo, what consequences can have this in terms of the warranty?
Today I installed out of curiosity the mentioned extension to control the radar sound. For some it may be the solution to the sound problem, but it wasn't for me. So I uninstalled it and afterwards all peeps were gone. Silence, not a single beep, neither for turn-by-turn nor for radar nor for notifications. I checked every option possible, switched all kind of audio alerts on and off and on, with no effect. Even after a reboot my Karoo refused to make any kind of noise. At this time I really thought that the extension somehow killed the beeper of the Karoo, because it didn't work even after a second reboot. Fortunately I tried s third reboot before resetting the whole thing and finally all the noise was back. I never thought I would be so happy to hear those loud beeps again. Life can be funny sometimes.
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> I contacted the private developer, and he assured me that the turn-by-turn notification sound cannot be technically adjusted the way we would like it to be. So, we’ll have to live with it. At the latest, once the warranty period has expired, I will open the casing.
Sorry, not sure how to understand that one. Does he mean he cannot change it, because he has no access to these sounds from the third-party app or that it's not possible in general? Because if he is able to change the sounds of the radar tones, it must be possible to change the turn-by-turn sound characteristic as well, since it's using the same beeper. Did he try to share his solution with the hammerhead team? I don't own the radar extension (I don't have any radar device for testing), but it sounds like he did some adaptions, so that the sounds seem more pleasant, either by shortening the beeps or by changing the tones, so I don't see a reason why this should not be possible for other sounds as well..?
Hopefully there will be some fix in the future.
I have missed several turnings because I have deactivated these loud annoying sounds completely at the moment. As a temporary fix I will try to connect a super small bluetooth speaker to the Karoo, where it should be possible to adjust the volume, but that's not really a satisfying solution for a device that costs nearly 400 euro.. since I am riding gravel, I have always a small handlebar bag with me, where I can store it, but road bike users are surely not happy to add additional stuff to their bikes just for something, that should work out of the box. -
Hopefully a future update will solve the issue of the Radar alerts. The volume of the alerts is fine its just the number of times it beeps for every car that is the issue. A single or at the very most a double tone would be prefect. If double then NOT a long and a short beep just two short beeps.
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@Matthias S. As I tested the radar extension out of curiosity (and removed it afterwards because it was not what I was looking for), I can confirm that the sound is neither adapted or adjusted. It is simply a new tone, which frequency and duration could be adjusted. It has nothing to do with the old sound. Instead, you first have to disable radar alerts in one profile to use the new beep. I think that replacing the turn-by-turn alerts is a completely different matter, as navigation is deeply embedded in the Karoo OS, with a different internal chain of commands opposed to the radar, which is an external unit connected via Ant+ and works the same on different bike computers. I think, that could be the main difference why one is possible and one is not.
Beside, I would be deeply shocked and annoyed if an external developer (even theoretically) could have access to my routes (which would be required for the turn-by-turn commands).
For me, too, the radar alerts are the main problem, the rest of the alerts don't bother me that much.
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I agree that all the other tones are fine - it's just the radar tones and primarily the fact that each alert triggers a number of beeps in a "tune". I have also tried the extension and I do not like the fact that there is a warning that the device can be damaged. In addition the audio alert is delayed using the extension and does not sound as soon as the graphic appears. Plus I don't like the fact that the Radar icon appears with a line through it signifying that the alerts are disable once you turn off the built in alerts. Hammerhead need to address this really annoying feature as a priority. They also need to employ some people who actually ride bikes to pick up on this stuff early on before release.
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First ride with the Karoo 3.
Tried both the "old" and "new" audio alerts. I prefer the new ones as there are different sounds for different types (routing, radar, drink alert...) but they are waaaay too loud.
How can this has not be detected during tests? Even riding in town, the beeps are heard by people walking nearby. And in the silence of nature, it's just awful.
I'm sure there's something that can be improved by shortening or adapting the tone.
I fear to ride with my friends now, they're gonna be disturbed by all the beeps during our rides.
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@Product Team: I noticed as well that some audio alerts are much less intrusive than others (e.g. the „new message“ alert). The reason seems to be that a sequence of very short tones seem to be less loud. Therefore, to me a suitable workaround would be to be able to manually assign the available audio alerts to each event type. That way I could assign the least intrusive audio alerts to the most frequent events (e.g. radar alert) or vice versa.
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Most of the time the Karoo 3 beeper is too loud for me (turn by turn navigation alert). And I don't need a "melody", a single beep is totally fine.
I know it is not possible to adjust the volume of the beeper but it is possible to set the frequency and the duration of a beep. Just as it is done with the kradar extension:
You can try this extension even without a radar unit. Setting the desired frequency and duration allows you to adjust the subjective volume.
My feature request:
Please add this single beep (together with frequency, duration and test button) as a third option besides audio alert old and new.
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As I have said repeatedly on other similar threads (which Hammerhead keep closing as "complete") the issue is NOT with the volume, it is the number of beeps emitted when a radar event is triggered. As above, if desired, the perceived volume can be altered by changing the audio frequency of the alert tone but for me, loud is fine, it's just that the alerts are seemingly continuous in heavy traffic which is further exacerbated by the alert when the event is cleared - no need at all for this in my opinion but an option to turn it on and off would be fine. Hammerhead could easily change this as proved by the developer who has created the radar app.
The bike radar technology is one that many many riders find invaluable from a road safety perspective and with good reason, it's a great innovation. I suspect Hammerhead are compromising the use of it by forcing riders to disable the alerts because they do not wish to install apps that come with a warning that it might damage their very expensive bike computer. It's a very very poor implementation and has been raised by this community many many times yet Hammerhead refuse to address it. Not good.
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If “complete” were synonymous with “closed”, then why can comments still be made in these threads?
'Complete' sounds like no further software updates are to be expected in this case. Maybe there are far fewer complaints about the alerts overall than we think, or more people than we think are happy with the new sounds and the extension or they already work on a new unit. We'll never know, but I think Hammerhead may have its own virtual partner in this.
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