[hopbackguy]

Getting a problem recently with music on my iPhone. It's a 4S, with iOS 7, which has been on it for about 6 months now, so nothing new about the software. Recently, I plug in the phone, the Ampera console shows 'Reading USB' - and thats it. Sticks on that forever. Powering off the car (for whatever period) makes no difference, neither does powering the phone off and on. Neither does deleting all the music from the phone, then re-syncing to put the music on again. Nothing special about the music as far as I'm aware, just two playlists and about 225 tracks. One of the playlists is a 'Smart Playlist' but I can't see how this could make any difference as the 'smart' bit only means anything to iTunes on the computer. It has always worked until a couple of weeks ago, when I changed in iTunes which playlists and tracks to sync across. When the display is stuck on 'Reading USB', even unplugging the USB cable doesn't make any difference, it sticks showing that message. I'm wondering what the car doesn't like!

 

[Lee Dalton]

Maybe it's viewing the iPhone as a USB stick rather than a phone and is struggling as it cannot see any mp3 files ?
Other than that, I am at a loss. Just hoping mine doesn't do the same when I get it

 

[hopbackguy]

Maybe it's viewing the iPhone as a USB stick rather than a phone and is struggling as it cannot see any mp3 files ?
Other than that, I am at a loss. Just hoping mine doesn't do the same when I get it

No, it's definitely seeing the phone as an iPod, as normal. All I can think of doing (since I can't manually reboot the audio system on the car) is try varying the number of playlists and tracks to see if there's a specific track causing problems.

 

[h8ten]

I don't have an iPhone but I have a micro 32Gb usb stick in the slot. I have literally thousands of tracks on the stick (copies of all my music collection) and it stays in the car. No problem so far with any sort of playback.

 

[Lee Dalton]

Have you tried a different usb device ? Might reset it.

 

[hopbackguy]

Have you tried a different usb device ? Might reset it.

Well today, I've been using a USB stick with about 300 tracks on it and thats fine. I'll try the iPhone again in the next day or two. USB isn't as convenient as the phone for a couple of reasons, namely 1) I have to copy the tracks across manually as opposed to automatic iTunes sync and 2) I lose all my playlists.

 

[Lee Dalton]

I can feel your pain on that one! However, hopefully it will reset the usb device memory in the audio unit and allow the device to see your iphone properly again

 

[hopbackguy]

I'm still using the usb stick at the moment. The other day I tried unplugging the stick and plugging the phone in again and still get the problem. So the next thing to try is removing the music from the phone, putting just a couple of tracks on, plugging it in again (so with luck the car will realise the phone has changed what's on it), then if that works, reloading my music on the phone.

 

[Lee Dalton]

How about pulling the stereo fuse out ? that should reset its memory surely ?

 

[hopbackguy]

Hmm hadn't thought of that. Last resort I think, after I've tried 'soft' methods

 

[Lee Dalton]

Likewise, I hadn't thought of it until just now, but remember that in the old days, a blown fuse or flat battery would always wipe the memory on a stereo head unit….

 

[hopbackguy]

Right, well a couple of weeks ago, I did what I said which was to erase all music from the phone and plug it in - no difference, still stuck on 'Reading USB'. Since then I've been running music off a memory stick happily. Today I thought I'd take out the stick and plug the phone in. It begins playing songs but the display is STILL stuck on 'Reading USB'. When I go into the iPod menu on the Ampera display, I can see it has the correct number of playlists, genres, albums etc BUT it has the number of songs as 1623 - there's nothing like this on the phone, only about 350. I listed the songs and its got each song listed about 5 times! Definitely got its knickers in a twist. And theres no way of saying 'forget it'. So looks like it may that fuse removal idea Lee.....

 

[hopbackguy]

I didn't remove the fuse in the end, because I did a bit more Googling and found hits that talked about doing a cold boot of the iPhone to cure similar sounding problems, so that's what I did. And it worked ... sort of. Next time I connected the phone, it quickly started playing the first song and went to the 'now playing' display with cover art etc, all correct. So it looked like it fixed it except.... When I went into the menu, it still showed 1623 songs when in fact there are only 316 on the phone, plus some podcasts. Anyway, that'll do for the moment The car is in for the DRL update and 'other software updates' tomorrow, that others have had, so I'm hoping that might reset the audio unit.

 

[h8ten]

Could the phone be picking up any other sounds I.e ringtones etc and adding them to the lost of tracks? Maybe an Apple update as opposed to the car?

 

[hopbackguy]

Could the phone be picking up any other sounds I.e ringtones etc and adding them to the lost of tracks? Maybe an Apple update as opposed to the car?

No, no ringtones or other audio thats visible, though of course its always possible that iOS 7.1 in the phone is somehow returning links to storage thats been freed as a result of previous iTunes sync operations. I'm not aware of a bug such as this though, I would have expected it to have been raised as a result of dock connections etc.