Early 2016 i3 - ipod touch weirdness

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Elbow

New member
Joined
Apr 30, 2019
Messages
4
Hi,

Based on positive posts around the place I bought an ipod touch for use in the car.

I connected it to the central console USB port. It gets Internet from a separate Mifi in the car.

I use Tidal, a podcast app and TuneIn mainly on it. It has my music collection on it too but I also copied most of that into the iDrive storage so I don't need to play my own music off the iPod.

I find the behaviour weird and its actually aggravating to use.

Most often when I turn the car on it decides to start playing from the iPod music by itself. My first track is a recorded phone call actually so I hear this old phone call recording start to play back most times.

If I then open say TuneIn and try to start a radio station it will play for a couple of seconds and then pause and go back to the "music" playback. If I hit Play repeatedly in Tunein it will do the same over and over but usually it will eventually "stick". Assuming I didn't crash in the meantime.

I sometimes see some sort of artwork for what I'm listening to, other times not. In some apps the previous/next roller seems to do something useful, other times not.

So all in all for me it doesn't seem to work well. I suspect I'd have a cleaner experience just using the Aux In - but then of course no chance of any integration with the iDrive with the most practical problem being no auto-pausing when I shut down the car.

Anyone got hints for me?

Thanks,
@Elbow, Cape Town
 
Totally understand the frustrations you’re having. I had a similar experience trying to make my iPhone interface with iDrive. Not sure if the issue is with Apple or BMW. Regardless, I gave up. Now I just keep music on the internal hard drive. Use an old iPod nano connected to USB for podcasts. When I run through the latest episodes, I bring it inside to update with a manual sync to iTunes.
 
+2 on the iPhone headaches. Most of the OP's complaints also apply to my iPhone experience to date.

My phone only has one audio file on it, "Ding, dong, the witch is dead" from The Wizard of Oz. (It is an integral part of an annual celebration in my office, so I need to keep it handy.) It seems to randomly start playing at the worst possible times, and let's just say that I have the muscle motion to tap the volume knob on the dashboard to pause the playback down to instinct by now.

There is allegedly some advanced Bluetooth something-or-other function in some iDrive setups across the BMW line, and it supposedly gives better app integration with things like Pandora. It requires the more complex vehicle package options coding, which I still have not set up the software/hardware tool chain to tinker with yet.

Since my last vehicle had Apple CarPlay, I'm seriously thinking about dropping the coin with Bimmer-Tech and doing the upgrade to get it and be done with the whole BMW iOS integration mess.....
 
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