Bluetooth pairing a radio to RPI 3B

[Dragon12]

OS Rasberrian Feb 2020
Board 3B

Thank you for reading this.

I'm trying to pair my 3B Board to a Bluetooth equipped car radio. Clicking on the Bluetooth icon and selecting "add" shows a list containing the radio, so far so good. Clicking on the "pair" button then displays a number that has to be entered but without an edit box to take the number. I have paired a Bluetooth keyboard via the same process and an edit box was displayed.

Pairing the same radio to my phone, tablet and Linux laptop was easy and no number was required, I just clicked "pair".

I've searched the forum and the Internet for any clues but found nothing relating to entering a pairing code. Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated.

[Dragon12]

It's been quite some time since I've used my Raspberry Pi and it took some time to become familiar with it again.

Instead of pairing from the Pi to the radio, I made the PI discoverable and paired that way. It took a little while for me to realise that I needed to select the bluetooth audio device from the audio control list. What slowed me down was that mpc play only streamed the radio stations to the HDMI TV no matter what I tried and VLC wouldn't play any radio streams only downloaded files. At the same time YouTube streams worked correctly. I eventually discovered that the local public WiFi wouldn't let me stream via VLC but mpc play and YouTube were OK. Anyway, problem solved and I'm pleased to have rediscovered my Raspberry Pi.