iPod Classic 160 / 14k songs.

[spr]

Hi folks.

Waiting for a new 2013 Explorer.... very excited! Upgrading/trading in my old 2005 Escape Hybrid.

Anyway - I really depend on my iPod to get me through my 90 minute commute each way. I had a 'PIE' hardware interface for the Escape which I think was the greatest thing since sliced bread - sounded great (direct wired into SAT port) and used the ipod itself for navigating music.

Nervous - I have heard so many 'iffy' things about MFT. Here is my qustion:

I have an iPod classic, 160GB. There is about 80 Gigs of music on it - nearly 14,000 tracks. Fairly meticulously labled and tagged.

Does anyone have the big iPod classic connected to MFT and (gulp) are there any serious issues with having that volume of songs? I intend to leave the iPOD in and connected most of the time... except for when the car will be left in the sun.

Lastly - does being connected to MFT prohibit the user from occasionally using the iPod controls to navigate music?

Any comments appreciated....thanks.

 

[R1chard]

Hi folks.

Waiting for a new 2013 Explorer.... very excited! Upgrading/trading in my old 2005 Escape Hybrid.

Anyway - I really depend on my iPod to get me through my 90 minute commute each way. I had a 'PIE' hardware interface for the Escape which I think was the greatest thing since sliced bread - sounded great (direct wired into SAT port) and used the ipod itself for navigating music.

Nervous - I have heard so many 'iffy' things about MFT. Here is my qustion:

I have an iPod classic, 160GB. There is about 80 Gigs of music on it - nearly 14,000 tracks. Fairly meticulously labled and tagged.

Does anyone have the big iPod classic connected to MFT and (gulp) are there any serious issues with having that volume of songs? I intend to leave the iPOD in and connected most of the time... except for when the car will be left in the sun.

Lastly - does being connected to MFT prohibit the user from occasionally using the iPod controls to navigate music?

Any comments appreciated....thanks.

Yes, just like in every other recent iPod enabled vehicle the iPod becomes unavailable if connected to the main entertainment system (displays the car brand logo instead).

I have about 10K songs on my iPod Classic and have not had a problem with it having that many songs. However you must give the MFT time to build the voice commands based on the music library and not expect it to be "ready to go" right away. The voice indexing does not take long.

Hope this helps.

 

[spr]

Thank you!

Yes, I wasnt really expecting iPod control. The big thing is if I can hope for it to be relatively OK. I'm not too concerned with idexing time - as long as its not... you know... 10-20 minutes every time I startup.

Maybe I will clean out some of my playlists... waaaay too many anyway.

Thanks again...

 

[roamingphantom]

Hi,
I have a 120gb classic with about 9k songs and it plays fine. Usually i would wait for about 5 mins before i can play anything, i havent used voice command on the ipod yet.

 

[spr]

Hi,
I have a 120gb classic with about 9k songs and it plays fine. Usually i would wait for about 5 mins before i can play anything, i havent used voice command on the ipod yet.

Usually.

5 minutes.

so I guess music on a quick run to the store 5 minutes away is out?

(sigh)

 

[FordIVTteam]

Usually.

5 minutes.

so I guess music on a quick run to the store 5 minutes away is out?

(sigh)

Congrats on your soon-to-be new ride, spr!

Your iPod shouldn't index every time you get in your vehicle unless:

It didn't finish indexing on a previous drive.
Your metadata is screwy.
You add new music every day.

To listen to music that is already indexed, turn Autoplay on in the Options menu (when you're on the Entertainment quadrant). With it off, your music won't begin to play until all media has all been indexed.

Let me know if you need any help figuring things out when you get your Explorer!

Rebecca

 

[spr]

Update:

Got the new explorer today. . It is a very, very nice vehicle. Totally love it.

Eventually I sat down with it and decided to connect the iPod. Seemed to go pretty well. It indexed it for about...oh I dont know... 10 minutes... and then said it was creating 'voice commands' for a while longer... then all was working nicely for a few hours today.

I went somewhere, stopped the vehicle - came back.. everything still working fine. Tried some voice commands and it started up some playlists nicely (of which there are several hundred) and that was working ok too. I was feeling very grovvy about all this. 'Whats all the fuss about?', I was thinking.

Then suddenly.

"Indexing.." and its dead. Ipod no longer thinks its connected, Vehicle thinks it is still connected. Cable physically connected but obviously the link is broken somehow.

Eventually disconnected iPod.. still says my iPod is connected, and still says its indexing. Its totally hung up. Tried different USB port, no dice. 'Information' for the ipod shows nothing so it 'partly' knows that its been disconnected, but the iPod name still shows under USB devices and is 'indexing'.

First day? totally hung up, really? Not a good first impression - and there is NO WAY to reboot this MFT without doing a master reset and losing all your settings etc? That, I must say... is a little silly.

*sigh*

Im pretty leery of this 'delayed reboot' thing. Ford would probably have heart failure if I asked them about it.. anyone else use it?

http://outofmytouch.com/reboot.html

I will mess with it a little tomorrow. If all else fails, I may be pulling the fuse just to try and get it working again. (to clarify - everything on MFT ans Sync appears to be working BESIDES currently having the USB connection mysteriously locked onto a disconnected iPod.)

 

[spr]

Another Update:

Ran 'Sync My Itunes' over my library - but not really wanting to since I have spent, probably, hundreds of hours meticulously tagging this music through the past 5+ years or so.

Anyway - seems it insists on removing anything in all caps. Such as a band names (CAKE, ABBA, etc..) now becomes Cake, Abba. Song names that include uppercase words (such as '3:00 AM' now become '3:00 Am'). So - its not 'fixing' improperly tagged music - it is partly forcing it into a format that IT likes, which is annoying. I also changed the name of the iPod so that the system would see it as a new device and start from scratch perhaps. Out of 14,000 tracks - if found about 1,000 it wanted to 'fix'. With a sour taste in my mouth - I clicked 'OK'.

And of course - it flatly removes all 'compilation' indicators from all tracks. Also annoying. I have plenty of classical and holiday CDs where this absolutely makes sense.

Regardless - I just let it go - but just wanted to say that to me it didnt really fix things, just changed some items to its own prefferences. I have often seen the suggestion that music tagging is 'sloppy' or somehow erroneous - and sometimes I would say that assumption is crap. Rather - poorly written software simply cant handle it. If music tags are that bad - then voice commands simply wont work and that would be fine - but the system should never lock up and become unusable. That is inexcusable.

I ran the reboot utility mentioned in the previous post. Works great. I would reccomend it. I will leave it on a USB stick in case I need it. It rebooted SYNC, and it came up clean without erasing all the settings I have been messing with for HOURS (NAV points, etc). Reconnected ipod, it indexed it, recreated voice commands... all good. What rebooting the system will NOT do, I assume, is that if there is actually 'bad data' in the system, rebooting wont help of course. But it did, in this case, correct the 'ghost ipod' problem where the system was stuck thinking an ipod was connected and was also stuck 'indexing' it. Again - 'bad data' that somehow gets into the MFT or SYNC system is the by-product of weak software - any problems should be filtered out before they create a configuration problem that crashed the system.

So far so good however. We will see how it goes through my first work-week of commuting and I will report back. When it is working - it seems pretty damn slick.

 

[spr]

ANOTHER update... as if anyone really cares.

MFT & Sync all seem to be working prefectly now. Voice commands are pulling up Albums and Playlists very nicely - it is pretty nice. I can disconnect/reconnect the iPod just fine and it isnt spending extra time 'indexing' anything.

 

[FordIVTteam]

ANOTHER update... as if anyone really cares.

MFT & Sync all seem to be working prefectly now. Voice commands are pulling up Albums and Playlists very nicely - it is pretty nice. I can disconnect/reconnect the iPod just fine and it isnt spending extra time 'indexing' anything.

I care, spr, and I'm glad everything is perfect! :biggthump

Rebecca

 

[ncbuckeye3]

Just saw this post and it made me Register so I could respond! I have a lot of music, I have 2 160gb iPod Classics, half my music is on one and half on the other, about 240gb total.

The MFT system in dealing with this absolutely drives me crazy. I plug them both in and leave them, about once every 10 days to 2 weeks I will bring them in and add anything new I have. In the time they are connected, they constantly are indexing. Since January, I have had about 2 hours of runtime where I could use the voice commands.

That isn't that bad, I have music available as soon as I plug them in and start the truck up, the thing I absolutely hate is when I want to change a song and I go to "Browse" and then to "Artists" and the "Artists" is not there. That's when I know it is losing the iPod. Sometimes it has been two days before it resets or whatever it does and I can access that device again, sometimes I can reset the iPod and it will see it.

I love everything about my vehicle, except the MFT. I dislike it so much that it would probably dissuade me from making this vehicle purchase if I had it to do all over again, I certainly would not recommend anything with MFT in it to another buyer.

If there is a way to fix this, then please enlighten me, I will be eternally grateful to you!

Thanks!

 

[jrmexplorer]

Update:

Im pretty leery of this 'delayed reboot' thing. Ford would probably have heart failure if I asked them about it.. anyone else use it?

http://outofmytouch.com/reboot.html

A lot of us use that. I personally use it all the time. About two years ago Sirius changed their channel information and so Sync needed to be updated to the latest channel info (or else the voice commands failed). Ford issued a "fix" which included a "delayed reboot" application. This delayed reboot rebooted your Sync system after you shutoff the car. Someone clever stripped the Sync voice command fix and left in the reboot app.

Ford knows about it and is somewhat ok with it. Not officially of course, but they haven't told us not to use it, and if I recall correctly, even said it was ok at one point in time.

 

[jrmexplorer]

So - its not 'fixing' improperly tagged music - it is partly forcing it into a format that IT likes, which is annoying. I also changed the name of the iPod so that the system would see it as a new device and start from scratch perhaps. Out of 14,000 tracks - if found about 1,000 it wanted to 'fix'. With a sour taste in my mouth - I clicked 'OK'.

And of course - it flatly removes all 'compilation' indicators from all tracks. Also annoying. I have plenty of classical and holiday CDs where this absolutely makes sense.

Regardless - I just let it go - but just wanted to say that to me it didnt really fix things, just changed some items to its own prefferences. I have often seen the suggestion that music tagging is 'sloppy' or somehow erroneous - and sometimes I would say that assumption is crap. Rather - poorly written software simply cant handle it. If music tags are that bad - then voice commands simply wont work and that would be fine - but the system should never lock up and become unusable. That is inexcusable.

Yeah, that's kinda the way it works though. You have to make some tweaks to get Sync to work right sometimes....

if you get a re-indexing issue - try this tip: pause music playback.

I have a USB stick with 800 music files that indexes completely (including voice commands) in under 2 minutes. Pausing playback increases indexing speed dramatically as the indexing functions are not competing for the USB bus with the playback functions.

[edit] just saw you have 14k tracks.... that's gonna take a long time regardless....

 

[jrmexplorer]

Just saw this post and it made me Register so I could respond! I have a lot of music, I have 2 160gb iPod Classics, half my music is on one and half on the other, about 240gb total.

The MFT system in dealing with this absolutely drives me crazy. I plug them both in and leave them, about once every 10 days to 2 weeks I will bring them in and add anything new I have. In the time they are connected, they constantly are indexing. Since January, I have had about 2 hours of runtime where I could use the voice commands.

That isn't that bad, I have music available as soon as I plug them in and start the truck up, the thing I absolutely hate is when I want to change a song and I go to "Browse" and then to "Artists" and the "Artists" is not there. That's when I know it is losing the iPod. Sometimes it has been two days before it resets or whatever it does and I can access that device again, sometimes I can reset the iPod and it will see it.

I love everything about my vehicle, except the MFT. I dislike it so much that it would probably dissuade me from making this vehicle purchase if I had it to do all over again, I certainly would not recommend anything with MFT in it to another buyer.

If there is a way to fix this, then please enlighten me, I will be eternally grateful to you!

Thanks!

Get the syncmyitunes application and run it on your ipods.
http://www.syncmyride.com/syncmedia/mediadownload/SYNC_My_iTunes_Setup.exe

Usually the re-indexing is caused by a number of issues:
1.) tags that Sync doesn't like (as the op found out) - syncmyitunes fixes most of these issues.
2.) failure to complete a previous index
3.) sometimes the index it does on startup isn't right so it gets in a cycle of creating bad indexes on startup. To fix this, wait until its done indexing, then go into the settings and have it manually rebuild the index. usually fixes things.

 

[spr]

I have been using it for a week now and have had no trouble with it once the initial problems were overcome. None.

Voice commands are pulling up playlists and artists and genres. I havent quite fugured out how to 'refine' for a specific album when an artist has 10 albums little things like that.

I think you are correct jrm... especially with a large library of music... if MFT never gets the chance to really index it fully... you will have never ending problems. After watching closely - it took about 30 minutes to index all of it and create the voice commands for 14,000 tracks a couple hundred playlist and a couple thousand artists.

Initially - it looked like it was reindexing simply because I switched between Sirius radio and then back to USB/iPod... but thankfully that seems to have been an anomaly and it isnt doing that anymore. And yes - my gut feeling was to not use the iPod while it was indexing - maybe not totally necessary.

If I do take the ipod out and re-sync it with a computer to add music or whatever - I will do it knowing that the MFT system will need a good half hour to index it - totally understandable considering the volume music on it. I am going to have to to this since I have many playlists that were more 'visually' created and I will have to rename some things to make them more linguisticly accessible with Sync.

"4+ Alt/Pop/Rock" or "Classical - Mvts:allegro' for examples. Alternative, Rock and Pop songs with a rating 4 stars or better. I am fine with renaming stuff like this to make it easier to use. What I was not fine with, was the evidence that MFT was simply unable to get through it.

After the inidial difficulties with it - it has been nearly flawless, so I am relieved. I would buy this vehicle again in a heartbeat. However - I am a tech geek and fully admit that this system is not as bullet proof as it should be and is going to cause some people some serious headaches.

 

[spr]

Get the syncmyitunes application and run it on your ipods.
http://www.syncmyride.com/syncmedia/mediadownload/SYNC_My_iTunes_Setup.exe

Usually the re-indexing is caused by a number of issues:
1.) tags that Sync doesn't like (as the op found out) - syncmyitunes fixes most of these issues.
2.) failure to complete a previous index
3.) sometimes the index it does on startup isn't right so it gets in a cycle of creating bad indexes on startup. To fix this, wait until its done indexing, then go into the settings and have it manually rebuild the index. usually fixes things.

agree on all of this.