Why can’t anyone come up with a decent iPod interface for cars?

If you read my previous post, you probably suspect that I went ahead with the purchase.  Yes I did.  The Acura RDX is indeed geek nirvana.  And understated in my prose was the voice command capability of the vehicle.  Oh, it’s awesome!  So far, my favorite commands are “XM 41″ for some head-banging tunes, “passenger temperature 32 degrees” to freeze out whoever is riding with me, and “find nearest fast food restaurant” for righteous eats.  The whole system is very seamless and it seems like pretty much every function of the car can be manipulated with voice commands.

So why, then, does the iPod dock suck so much?

Oh, it’s horrible.  When I first plugged the iPod in, the iPod’s screen changed to tell me basically that the Acura had taken it over and the controls would no longer work.  “Fine,” I thought, “as long as it’s easy to navigate around.”  Well, it instantly started playing every song on my iPod.  I could track forward and back and that was it.  And the Acura’s multifunction display simply reported the volume and that was it.  Supreme waste of screen real estate.  What, no artist and track info?

I later discovered that there is accompanying software to go with the Acura Music Link, as it’s called.  So I gave it a go.  The CD had both Windows and Mac software and since I run iTunes on my Mac, that’s what I installed.  What the application did was scan my iPod and then create audio files of text-to-speech representations of all my artists, albums, genres, and playlists.  As well, it also created audio files for each letter of the alphabet.

By reading the documentation, I discovered that these can be used to scan my iPod for the stuff I want to hear.  Here’s how to use it.

The multi-CD player’s controls are used.  The Disc 5 and Disc 6 buttons are used to change discs (why not use the Next Disc and Previous Disc buttons?).  Once a disc number is selected, pressing and holding the Fast Forward button switches to that disc.  Disc 5 plays the entire iPod in album order.  Disc 6 plays the entire iPod in shuffled order.  Discs 1-4 all act similar, as I’ll illustrate, but they’re each for a different method.  Disc 1 is playlist, disc 2 is artist, disc 3 is album, and disc 4 is genre.

When any of discs 1-4 are selected, the stereo starts going through the text-to-speech alphabet files, so you hear “A… B… C… D…” etc.  When you get to the letter you desire that is the first letter of whatever it is you wish to hear, you then press Fast Forward again.  Then the Acura Music Link starts with the first one of those that starts with that letter.  So, say you have playlists called “My Favorites” and “My New Stuff”.  You can go to disc 1 (playlists), then go to “M”, and then “My Favorites” will start.

Alternately, when you select the letter, you can then immediately press and hold Fast Forward again (you have to be fast) and the system will start reading off the list of whatever that starts with that letter.  So in the example above, you will actually hear, “My Favorites… My New Stuff…” and so on, through all the playlists starting with M.

All in all, that’s not bad, but still far from ideal.  My favorite group is Rush, so I went to disc 2 and then waited for the system to get to “R”, and then waited a looooong time (80GB iPod, after all) for it to list all my “R” artists up to “RU…” and then it said, “Rush.”  I immediately pressed Fast Forward to select that artist and…

Natalie Imbruglia started playing.  Aw come on!  All that crap to discover it didn’t index my iPod correctly?  And guess what.  Every time you change what’s on your iPod (even for podcasts), you have to delete all of the sound files and re-run the Music Link application to let it recreate all of the sound files (takes about 25 minutes), and then sync your iPod again!

Needless to say, this is the worst iPod car system ever.

In my other car, I have the Dension IceLink, which has a slightly different tactic.  It sets the first 5 playlists on your iPod to be discs 1-5 and the stereo thinks the iPod is a disc changer.  Not too gawdawful bad.  But it messes with the iPod really badly (it frequently requires resets after being disconnected).  But there is a UI mode that lets you just manipulate the iPod with the iPod controls themselves.  And the “next track” and “previous track” controls on the dash work most of the time.

But this Acura Music Link thing can be used in an almost similar mode.  Without the use of the software, the system will continue to play whatever was currently queued on the iPod when it was plugged in.  But remember, the controls on the iPod are frozen.  So if you want to change playlists or artists or whatever, you have to pull over (the cord from the glove box isn’t long, so it’s really dangerous to mess with it while driving), unplug the iPod, change to what you want to hear, plug it back in, and then get back on the road.  Lame!

In the end, I can’t understand why this system, in this car, is so bad.  After all, the car’s system already has text-to-speech capabilities as I hear it tell me what streets to turn onto all the time, as well as announce what XM station I am listening to by name.  So why should it need these sound files on the iPod?  The car also has speech-to-text capabilities, albeit limited ones.  Like I can say “Summit” and it will list streets that are phonetically similar and let me choose from among them.  That same system would be ideal for iPod navigation.

I can plug my iPod into my Xbox 360 and suddenly I can browse all my tracks and albums and artists on my TV.  Why can’t a car’s iPod link system do the same thing?  But the Xbox can’t play protected tracks, but at least it can “see” what’s on the iPod.

The IceLink in my other car can change tracks on my iPod.  So, I know that technology exists?

So why is it that every system out there, particularly those in cars, that are designed to play an iPod only maybe do one thing well and drop the ball on all others?  Why is it so difficult to make a system that will read the playlists, artists, albums, etc. from the iPod and display them and allow you to browse and search and select them?  And then it should manipulate the iPod, allowing it to itself play, but then pull the sound through the line-out part of the jack.

In the end, I just got a cigarette lighter charger for my iPod from Monster and just play it through the aux jack.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 15th, 2007 at 10:49 am and is filed under Acura, Apple, Audio, Cars, Gadget, MP3, Podcast, Software, Xbox, iPod.