[softcaution]

Hi.

First post but feel compelled to because of the usual mess that is Mercedes in car audio, and the complete lack of manufacturer support for it!

I have a 2016 GLA with the new Audio 20. It's caused nothing but problems to be honest. The comedy is the local dealer doesn't seem to know any more than me so learning about the system appears to trial and error.

It started with my iPhone being recognised then repeatedly disappearing and reappearing in an endless loop. The local dealer blamed iOS 9...that actually turned out to be the cable, which works fine with everything else, but the Merc is too picky for it. On the third different original Apple cable I finally got it to work.

I use iTunes Match which seems to cause issues with the coverflow, in that the artist, album and artwork are all jumbled up, and when you select an album what starts playing is 'none of the above'. I assume you get the same problem with AppleMusic.

My next solution was to use an SD card. This seems better and in cover flow everything works fine. That is until you play approx 50% of the music, which has no artwork. I have no idea why. I like to think I know what i'm doing when it comes to iTunes, and I have an extensive library which has taken a lot of work. I know all the files have embedded artwork (as per dougscripts in iTunes) so finally my question...

Does anyone have any idea why the album art shows correctly in the cover flow, but is then missing from an individual track/album. I do know it's nothing to do with artwork size, or format.

I love the car, but I think Mercedes could really do to sort this sort of thing out. Less premium manufacturers and after market systems can do it...why not Mercedes?!!

Hope that at least makes some sense.

Thanks.

 

[WhiteRabbit]

Hi.

First post but feel compelled to because of the usual mess that is Mercedes in car audio, and the complete lack of manufacturer support for it!

I have a 2016 GLA with the new Audio 20. It's caused nothing but problems to be honest. The comedy is the local dealer doesn't seem to know any more than me so learning about the system appears to trial and error.

It started with my iPhone being recognised then repeatedly disappearing and reappearing in an endless loop. The local dealer blamed iOS 9...that actually turned out to be the cable, which works fine with everything else, but the Merc is too picky for it. On the third different original Apple cable I finally got it to work.

I use iTunes Match which seems to cause issues with the coverflow, in that the artist, album and artwork are all jumbled up, and when you select an album what starts playing is 'none of the above'. I assume you get the same problem with AppleMusic.

My next solution was to use an SD card. This seems better and in cover flow everything works fine. That is until you play approx 50% of the music, which has no artwork. I have no idea why. I like to think I know what i'm doing when it comes to iTunes, and I have an extensive library which has taken a lot of work. I know all the files have embedded artwork (as per dougscripts in iTunes) so finally my question...

Does anyone have any idea why the album art shows correctly in the cover flow, but is then missing from an individual track/album. I do know it's nothing to do with artwork size, or format.

I love the car, but I think Mercedes could really do to sort this sort of thing out. Less premium manufacturers and after market systems can do it...why not Mercedes?!!

Hope that at least makes some sense.

Thanks.

The album art fix for each track is to use a program such as MP3TAG (Free) to tag each track with the album art. Then it will display correctly.

 

[softcaution]

All my music files have the artwork embedded in them, aside from the fact that you can physically see it in each individual file on a Mac, dougscripts is returning zero files without artwork. Artwork also displays correctly on my Sonos system which will only show embedded artwork.

I don't think that's it....there's something else going on.

 

[imkool0316]

If i play my Spotify app over Bluetooth, there is no artwork picture
If i connect via wire, YES. The artwork will pop up

 

[softcaution]

Hi all,

I appear to have solved the problem so just thought i'd jot down a couple of things in case anyone else has a similar issue(s).

1) The system seems to be particularly picky about the USB cable you use. I found a genuine Apple cable (and it was the second of those) was the only one that worked. Prior to that I was getting 'Activating Device', it would then work for few minutes, then cut out followed by 'Activating Device' and so on. In my experience, despite what the local dealer said, iOS 9 appears to work fine and is NOT the problem. This is on an iPhone 5s.

2) Bluetooth works fine with iOS 9.

3) The system seems to struggle with iTunes Match and I assume, with Apple Music. On the cover flow the Artist, Album and Cover are all incorrect, and when you select a cover, the album that plays is 'none of the above'. That said, all other aspects appear to work.

4) As for the SD card...my solution was this;

- I formatted a Class 10 64GB SD card in the ExFAT format.
- In iTunes, I used a script (Doug's AppleScripts for iTunes - dougscripts.com) to save all album artwork as a .jpg in the album folder which re-sized the artwork to 1200x1200 at the same time. One happy side effect of this was that all my artwork is a good resolution but the file sizes are now on average about 200kb.
- I then removed all artwork from my iTunes Library by selecting all songs, selecting 'Get Info', then selecting the small cover in the top left corner. Once you click 'OK' it will remove all embedded artwork.
- I then used another dougscript to 'restore album artwork from folder'. This embeds your newly re-sized artwork back into each track. There is another dougscript that will check your library and put any tracks without embedded artwork into a playlist for easy sorting although if it's done correctly there will be none.
- Once this was done I simply copied the relevant music to the SD card & plugged it into the car. It will start to play the first track. What you need to do then is go to 'search', select 'search by cover' and the system will then read all the relevant info on the card.

I now have just shy of 60GB of music, displaying, and playing, correctly from an SD card. The only remaining issue I have is that some playlists are not displaying correctly. That'll have to be a work in progress.

Hope that helps!

ps This thread is definitely worth a read;

http://www.glaowners.com/forum/elec...playlists-sd-card-likely-usb-sticks-long.html

 

[DavidM]

The Mercedes system does seem to have issues with the cable for whatever reason. I have another thread on here about my issues with an older iPod. The only way I could get it to work consistently was to use the Mercedes lightning cable. My suggestion to folks is to get the Mercedes cable. They are more than your basic cable, but can still be found on eBay for not too much or have your dealer give you one if you didn't get one with your car.

Artwork appears to be an afterthought with the system coders. Artwork displays for us, but is messed up. Someone else has reported the same issue. I wouldn't think this would be an issue for a new car, but it is. Hopefully if enough people complain to Mercedes they will get the code fixed. We haven't taken the car to the dealer for the artwork issue yet as we don't want to leave the car there just for that.

David

 

[FatCow]

Will the system play FLAC files?

 

[imkool0316]

Hi.

First post but feel compelled to because of the usual mess that is Mercedes in car audio, and the complete lack of manufacturer support for it!

I have a 2016 GLA with the new Audio 20. It's caused nothing but problems to be honest. The comedy is the local dealer doesn't seem to know any more than me so learning about the system appears to trial and error.

It started with my iPhone being recognised then repeatedly disappearing and reappearing in an endless loop. The local dealer blamed iOS 9...that actually turned out to be the cable, which works fine with everything else, but the Merc is too picky for it. On the third different original Apple cable I finally got it to work.

I use iTunes Match which seems to cause issues with the coverflow, in that the artist, album and artwork are all jumbled up, and when you select an album what starts playing is 'none of the above'. I assume you get the same problem with AppleMusic.

My next solution was to use an SD card. This seems better and in cover flow everything works fine. That is until you play approx 50% of the music, which has no artwork. I have no idea why. I like to think I know what i'm doing when it comes to iTunes, and I have an extensive library which has taken a lot of work. I know all the files have embedded artwork (as per dougscripts in iTunes) so finally my question...

Does anyone have any idea why the album art shows correctly in the cover flow, but is then missing from an individual track/album. I do know it's nothing to do with artwork size, or format.

I love the car, but I think Mercedes could really do to sort this sort of thing out. Less premium manufacturers and after market systems can do it...why not Mercedes?!!

Hope that at least makes some sense.

Thanks.

Yeah, i confirm that there is a problem playing audio via USB. Because i always play my music over bluetooth, it play fine just once in a while it got the hiccup disrupt the song for like 0.5 sec. but today, when my iphone 6+(iOS 8 jailbreak) runs out of battery, i plug it in USB and play music and sh1t hits the fan.
ITS TERRIBLE!!!!
It plays in loop, when i hit next song(on my steering wheel) it plays the song again or skip ahead 2-3 songs. And it so slow compared to bluetooth which suppose to be faster because it is USB.
I am going to try my real cable taht comes original with my iphone tomorrow. I hope it will able to fix this crap. A Benz quality and cant even play the audio right, so lame.

 

[softcaution]

FatCow,

I've not tried it myself but I believe not. In the digital manual it gives a list of the file types the system will accept, it's about all it does tell you! I think there's also a mention of it in the link I gave.

 

[softcaution]

Playlists?

Aside from that, has anyone got playlists working correctly from an SD card?

I've exported them from iTunes in the .m3u format and edited them using text edit as per the thread I linked to. I have discovered that on the very latest (2016) Audio 20 system, it should be a forward slash (/) rather than back (\) and did get one playlist of just over 100 songs to work for a while.

The system is recognising all the others, in the sense that when I select 'Playlists' they are all listed, but when you select one of them, it show as being blank.

It's driving me nuts. What am I doing wrong?! Is there a limit in the length of the playlist name, or number of songs i'm missing or something?

Many thanks.