Mazda3 Forums banner

iPod interface odd Behavior

10K views 4 replies 4 participants last post by  jsproat 
#1 ·
My wife's new 2015 Mazda3 is awesome, except that the iPod interface behaves oddly. I have 2 issues. But first, what are my expectations? With my Nissan Leaf I control the iPod from the dashboard display/controls. I play an album or playlist. When I stop the car then later start the car, the iPod picks up where it left off. That's what I expect.

1) Our Mazda3 does not pick up where it left off. It always plays the first song on the iPod alphabetically, which in our case is ABC by the Jackson 5. We start the car, ABC comes on. We navigate through the dashboard interface to albums, then our album of choice and start to play it. We get to the store, turn the car off, get back in – ABC. I hope there is a way around this.

2) Random glitchyness. Sometimes when we navigate to the album and the track, it displays the chosen track for about 2 seconds then it switches over to ABC. Other times, it plays the track we want. Sometimes there is no volume. We can see the progress bar moving, but no sound. We switch to the radio and it sounds fine, back to the iPod – nothing. Then later, without changing anything, it works fine.

Anyone out there with these issues?
 
#2 ·
You are definitely not the first person with iPhone compatibility issues in the new Mazda3. I am experiencing a streaming issue as well. I use Spotify, so I'm used to not using the car interface for selecting songs. Apple is not always the greatest with compatibility across the spectrum. Mazda says that the upcoming interface updates should help with some issues. Hopefully what they say is true. In the meantime, I have noticed that if I let the car sit for about 30 seconds after starting the car to let the system boot up on its own before I connect my iPhone, the transition moves much smoother.
 
#3 ·
try a flash drive instead of an iPod

jsproat, I know exactly what you are talking about. I had/have the same experience with my 2014 Mazda3. The Mazda3 infotainment system does not deal well with an iPod. I have found that if I just load mp3s onto a flashdrive and plug that in, instead of using an iPod, it mostly solves the problem. Probably 90-95% of the time it will pick up right where I left off. For some reason, the other 5-10% of the time it does just what you are describing, except in my case it's Blue Orchids by the White Stripes. Still, it's a huge improvement.
 
#4 ·
I posted this on the other thread about MP3s but I thought it might be helpful here too.


Hi Everyone, I'm new to the forum as well so please forgive me if I'm coming across as a newb.

As I've been reading through this thread, I've seen some common complaints about how the MP3/media player works. I hope I have some information that will help out though. I have a 2015 3 Touring S 5-door and have been pretty pleased with everything aside from the media player. Let me start with explaining some of the problems I've had.

I have a 160Gb iPod classic. It's only about 4 years old but apparently that's too old for the album art to be displayed on the media screen. It does display some of the colors from the album art but they only come across as solid lines of color, not as an actual image. It also has problems when you skip through too many songs, say 8-10, at once. When you do that, it typically causes the player to freeze & the whole system resets. Frustrating to say the least.

I took the car into the dealership where I bought it to have them look at it & they updated the software version to the latest version (version 33, I think). That still didn't fix the problem. So, I thought, maybe I could just dump all of my music onto a USB drive. I have a lot (10,000 + songs).

After playing around with the file formats quite a bit, I found that the player is very picky with MP3s and becomes exceedingly problematic the more music you try to add. Here are some of the issues I've encountered:

* The USB drive must be formatted as Fat32! NTFS & exFat WILL NOT work, it doesn't even read the file contents if the USB drive is in those formats. Unfortunately, most new USB drives can't even be formatted as Fat32. I did, however, find a program that will allow you to format any drive into Fat32 here: http://tokiwa.qee.jp/EN/Fat32Formatter/.

* Playlists only work when the playlist file (m3u) & mp3s are all in the root folder. If your songs are in subfolders, say for artist or album, it can play them but it won't load the playlists (I tried with and without relative paths in the playlists).

* If you put much more than 1,000 songs on the USB drive, it is very slow (+/-30 seconds) to load & start playing & it often will not resume where you left off.

* If you put more than 2,500 - 3,000 songs on the USB drive, it takes several minutes to load & start playing & it will never resume where you left off. The same seems to be true if you put more than 10-15 playlists & 1,000 or more songs on the drive.

So, I seem to be at a loss. Any of the new iPods, which will properly display the album art and prevent the freezing issues described above, can't hold all of my music (64Gb is the largest they make anymore). And, you can't seem to put that many songs on a USB drive and have it still work properly or not take forever to load.

My concession is to just put a couple thousand songs on a smaller drive and only a handful of my playlists. If I scale it back like that, it seems to work OK but I would much rather be able to find a way to get it to work with all of my music.

Hopefully any or all of this will be of some help to you all!
 
#5 ·
I solved my problem - sort of

I discovered that using an iPhone via blue tooth, instead of an iPod via USB, works perfectly. So I transferred all of my wife's music (thousands of songs) onto her phone. Now she can do playlists, albums, shuffle, etc, all through the menu interface. And now it always picks up where she left off. That is if she has her phone with her.
 
This is an older thread, you may not receive a response, and could be reviving an old thread. Please consider creating a new thread.
Top