MDI niggles

[cwcarruthers]

It works very well, the sound is great, but there are a few things that make it slightly less than seamless.

Sometimes when I start the car the iPod doesn't get recognised. And occasionally it recognises the aux port over the MDI (nothing is in the aux). I have to unplug my iPod and plug it back in again for it to work.

Occasionally at the start of a track it stutters/pauses for a split second.

Does anyone else have similar or other issues?

I have the exact same issues (factory fit in console).

To get some reliability I have to always set the iPhone playing whatever I want before I plug it in (paused of course), and wait 5-10 seconds after start up before turning on the RCD-510. The downside is that when I browse on the touch screen it goes to /Songs instead of where it is currently playing from. It seems to only know where to go to if you start playing from the RCD-510 unit, rather than start it from the iPhone before plugging in. Ugh.

As for the slight pause when changing tracks, that just sucks and I don't know how to avoid it.

Surely they can fix this in firmware? I am going to complain to the dealer at my first service, although I am convinced that will be entirely pointless.

[AdamD]

Sometimes when I start the car the iPod doesn't get recognised. And occasionally it recognises the aux port over the MDI (nothing is in the aux). I have to unplug my iPod and plug it back in again for it to work.

Occasionally at the start of a track it stutters/pauses for a split second.

Does anyone else have similar or other issues?

I have a genuine Honda iPod controller for my iPod in my Accord Euro, and it does the same things. I use an iPod Classic 6.5 gen (current model, 120G HDD), and if it's been powered down for some time - perhaps 2 days or more - it takes a long time to wake up; by the time it becomes responsive, the Honda controller reports an error about the device.

To get around this, I always switch to tuner mode before I turn the car off, so when I start the car again, it's not trying to read from the iPod immediately.

As for the stuttering/pausing, I have that from time to time as well, and have attributed it to the iPod disk spinning up, seeking and buffering the track. Sometimes the iPod becomes unresponsive as well, and needs hard-rebooting followed by playback with headphones inserted before it'll play music. Bloody annoying.

[Corey_R]

As for the slight pause when changing tracks, that just sucks and I don't know how to avoid it.

This has been an issue with MP3 from day one. 'Gapless playback' was never written into the specification.

Although it is quite possible to do these days, so many device manufacturers and software writers have refused to do it or claim it's not possible.

Even Apple are to blame here to some point. The iPod itself can't do 'gapless playback'. They use iTunes to do 'preprocessing' so that it analyses the track and figures out how far through the first and last frame(s) the song starts and stops and passes that information to the iPod so that it has the information - rather than the iPod just doing that work itself like some older players (which Appled killed with the ipod) could.

My feeling is that iTunes is also doing this preprocessing for AAC files as well.

Anyway - if Apple's engineers aren't smart enough to do gapless playback on their hardware, I guess it's no surprise that VW's engineers have the same issue.

[INOV8]

How about the SD card slot? Has anyone had any issues with playback?

[vwsp]

My MDI is factory fit and has worked perfectly (and hopefully continues to work that way!). Love it! Sorry to hear others are having problems though

[cwcarruthers]

My MDI is factory fit and has worked perfectly (and hopefully continues to work that way!). Love it! Sorry to hear others are having problems though

What type of device are you using with the MDI? Phone, iPod, HD?

[vwsp]

iPhone 8GB and iPod (it's pretty old, Nano I think, 4GB)

[ryano]

Tried to update the MDI but realised that I don't have the USB connection (thought the ipod lead plugged into a USB connection) - tried to load the firmware onto the ipod and put it into disk mode but no joy

going to try to find an ipod > usb converter somewhere

[pologti18t]

I have a Zen Creative Vision M. The thought of buying an Apple product gives me the shivers Fancy having to put up with iTunes!

[Olaf the Golaf]

My MDI is factory fit and has worked perfectly (and hopefully continues to work that way!). Love it! Sorry to hear others are having problems though

Mine is factory fitted and i use my iTouch and a USB MP3 player thing and haven't noticed any issues whatsoever. Might have to listen more carefully now and see if anything comes up.