Hit media button in truck: Me: "Play artist Depech Mode" Truck: Playing artist Clash Hit media button in truck: Me: "Play artist Eagles" Truck: Playing artist Beatles Hit media button in truck: Me: "Play arist Pink Floyd" Truck: Playing artist Mandalay Ford Sync: Performing at it's expected level of proficiency

 

Yes, but now the NSA knows what music you like. They probably recorded all the profanity you used as well.

 

I never even try using that junk. When I start the truck, the voice tells me that some voice commands are not available due to the number of files on my iPod. Suits me just fine. I prefer just using the aux input. Much easier to navigate 24,000+ tracks. LOL

 

I just used the iTunes plug-in they developed to help look for tag errors in your MP3s which helps Sync perform better. Now the whole USB isn't recognized. Yeeup. That's the SYNC I know..

 

LOL....... True, you have to put deliberate and exaggerated pause between each word to get it to work at an acceptable level. Forrest Gump would have had no problems with SYNC.

I used to have an after market single din radio in my old truck that had a front USB port, and it navigated with standard PC folder structure using the tune ****. Very user friendly. Found out this week with my new truck that SYNC doesn't like that, and wants every song in the root directory, period. So, I spent a couple of hours cleaning up all the data tags using MP3tag, and putting everything on an 8GB flash drive. It works fine now, and I kind of like it. Now, I only have 1,200 songs on the drive....hahahaha.....not 24,000! My God, 24K songs is 50 Days of music. Who the hell needs nearly two months worth of music in their truck...hahahahahaha.

As a side note, MP3tag lets you easily create playlists on your flash drive too. That is a nice feature to have, which basically gives you all of the functionality of an iPod for the price of a thumb drive.

Tim

 

Okay, so this is cool.

Are you saying I'll be able to insert a thumb drive and have a voice command jukebox?

Guess I'll have to move beyond CD's and start studying MP3's.

 

Well, you can command:
Artist--plays everything on the drive from that artist straight through, or you can shuffle it.
Album--plays everything on that album, straight or shuffle.
Track--plays that specific song.
Genre--plays everything that's been tagged with the genre you asked for, such as "rock", "alternative", "country", etc....

Since it is a computer driven piece of software, you can now see why accurate and consistent tagging of the MP3's is needed. The monkey's that work for the record labels don't care about this stuff, and the tags can vary widely in an artists collections of MP3's.

Example: Bob Seger, or Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band, or Bob Seger: Silver Bullet Band. Eagles, or The Eagles. You get the idea.

Just renaming does nothing to fix this. You need a free program like MP3tag to display all of the tags on the MP3 file, and "fix" them.

It took me a few hours to do about 1200 songs. Anything you didn't rip from a purchased CD will likely be a problem that needs attention. But like I said, two CD's from the same artist will often times have different tags, and that is what makes a "yes or no, no grey area" computer logic device like SYNC appear to be buggy. The SYNC software is inflexible, so you have to make the MP3's fit the software requirements. Once you do this, SYNC seems to work just fine for me.

The ability to create playlists with the tagging software is a nice bonus. We all have favorite songs from a particular artist, or genre, and making "best of" playlists is pretty cool. You can also make family/work safe playlists too, if that's a consideration.

So, if all of the above adds up to a "jukebox" in your mind, then the answer is yes.....lol.

Tim

 

LOL - well, I suppose I don't NEED that much music in my truck, but my iPod doesn't know of I'm at a party, or on a beach vacation, or on a road trip, or driving my lawn mower. So, it's all on the same iPod. It's a beautiful thing knowing that if I'm driving down the road and decide that I want to hear Ironic, by Alanis Morissette, u can. Followed by "Got to Give It Up", my Marvin Gaye. "Atomic Dog"?" King of The Road"? I've got 'em all! Lol.

My digital music collection is one of my prides and joys. All high-quality files with high bitrates, and everything tagged correctly. The tagging correction project took the better part of 2 months, about 8 years ago. Every night, that's what I did.

One more side note, if you're particular about your music collection, stay away from any software (on your computer) that offers to automatically correct any tags. This software is usually written by people that program computers, not love music. And, the album version of "Breath Again" by Toni Braxton is NOT the same as the single version and "Greatest Hits" version. I like my collection tagged perfectly.

The synch voice commands are wonderful for my neighbor's kid with a Nano and 150 songs in their collection - not for p pole with big digital music collections.

 

Hahahaha.....I understand what you're saying, I'm just astounded by the number. That must have been a painful couple of months tagging all of those tracks. I can't even imagine. I was ready to hang myself after a few hours of tagging....lol.

I agree about the auto tagging. Don't ever do that. The best way (and only way in my view...) is to manually tag each track. This way it's done right.

I hope to God you have two or three dedicated external flash hard drives with mirrored copies of your MP3 files after all of that work. I think I would be brought to tears if I had to recreate two months of work like that after a computer crash.

Tim

 

Yeah, it wasn't the MOST fun undertaking, but it was enjoyable. As much as I love music, it was fun learning MORE about the music I love. Lots of time on Wikipedia. LMAO!

And, I have my entire collection backed up about 3 times on various hard drives in case of loss - been there, done that! LOL! That's one of the awesome things about iTunes (my iPod Classic being the only Apple device I own) - I can simply copy my entire iTunes folder onto an external hard drive. Start the copy, and go to bed. It usually takes the better part of the night to copy 160 GB!