Using the USB port

[krzemien]

I have sent an e-mail to VOLVO Customer Care this weekend and there we are:

Thank you for your email presenting the feedback of your Volvo V70 and the features of this vehicle.

Further to your email, Volvo are constantly reviewing vehicles, and making modifications accordingly. When these modifications are made, we will take into account the feedback we have received, and also new design ideas to improve our vehicles appearance, performance or any other attribute. I have made a note of your feedback on our system and will make sure to pass these comments on to our design team for their future consideration.

I can confirm that other than the control knob, the arrows on the steering wheel and the up and down arrows on the centre consol, there is no other way to navigate through your iPod. I am sorry that this isn't as efficient as you would hope it to be, and I do understand that this can cause inconvenience. You are also unable to search with fast scrolling through letters as highlighted in your email. The comments that we have received from our product development team is that customer's find it useful to create playlists as these are more easily accessible and quicker to navigate through.

And further:

I have of course recorded your comments on our Customer Care system and as previously advised, these will be fed back to our design representatives and after sales care team for their future consideration.

So, I would say that although it's overwhelming to receive any response at speedy pace, and from the above it seems that VOLVO is aware of the limitations, it looks unlikely as this feature gets improved in foreseable future - at least for current owners. It was worth trying though, who knows...

[MacV70T5]

I bet you the wiring is still there for the USB. Worth checking with the dealer.

[tt82]

Old thread revival time.

Right, I've never been a big music fan so don't have millions of albums, so for now I have been happy using my local radio station or my small cd collection. This works fine when I'm commuting to work around Manchester, but only using CD's on long journeys is a bit of annoyance, especially with the glove box being so far away compared to my V40.

Last year when I drove to Sweden in my V40 I noticed the CD's being incredibly hot when ejecting them, indeed the whole stereo seemed to be acting like a furness! I ended up having it pulled halfway out and using a piece of card/plastic to direct the air from the vents onto it to cool it down. I'm hoping to avoid a repeat of this when I go to Italy on Hols next month.

Now as I said, I'm not really a big music fan and generally only listen to it in the car so I've never saw the need to buy an Ipod/mp3/etc, (I also hate Apple products with a passion.) but I thought I would invest in a cheap mp3 player for the trip! This would solve me having to continuosly having to change cd's and would free up the cd holders in the glovebox to carry a selection of dvd's to be used with RSE. This is what I bought - http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/8GB-Slim-M...item589df4fe76

So far so good. I have ripped a few cd's to mp3 using windows media player and loaded them on to the mp3 player. It works fine and plays the songs but I now have a couple of questions.

1: The songs are only listed in track order, and not by albums. Is there a way of browsing by album? From reading this thread it would appear I need to hit the enter button to do this.

2: How is it best to store the tracks/albums on the mp3 player? I initally tried with a various artist compilation cd. It came up as folders starting VARIOUS ARTIST > CLUBBED OUT DISC 1 > List of tracks. I then ripped CD2 but could not find it anywhere and think it may have overwrote cd1. I wiped the entire thing and started again, but using different cd's. Again I noticed them being stored in the format of ARTIST NAME > ALBUM NAME > track list. To avoid a repeat of albums from the same artist overwriting each other I cut the ALBUM NAME folder and pasted it in the main directory and then deleted the ARTIST NAME folder.
Will this interfere with the ability to select albums in the car?

Thanks for all your help.

[tt82]

Sorted it all now!

[berrymanuk]

Originally Posted by tt82

Old thread revival time.

Right, I've never been a big music fan so don't have millions of albums, so for now I have been happy using my local radio station or my small cd collection. This works fine when I'm commuting to work around Manchester, but only using CD's on long journeys is a bit of annoyance, especially with the glove box being so far away compared to my V40.

Last year when I drove to Sweden in my V40 I noticed the CD's being incredibly hot when ejecting them, indeed the whole stereo seemed to be acting like a furness! I ended up having it pulled halfway out and using a piece of card/plastic to direct the air from the vents onto it to cool it down. I'm hoping to avoid a repeat of this when I go to Italy on Hols next month.

Now as I said, I'm not really a big music fan and generally only listen to it in the car so I've never saw the need to buy an Ipod/mp3/etc, (I also hate Apple products with a passion.) but I thought I would invest in a cheap mp3 player for the trip! This would solve me having to continuosly having to change cd's and would free up the cd holders in the glovebox to carry a selection of dvd's to be used with RSE. This is what I bought - http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/8GB-Slim-M...item589df4fe76

So far so good. I have ripped a few cd's to mp3 using windows media player and loaded them on to the mp3 player. It works fine and plays the songs but I now have a couple of questions.

1: The songs are only listed in track order, and not by albums. Is there a way of browsing by album? From reading this thread it would appear I need to hit the enter button to do this.

2: How is it best to store the tracks/albums on the mp3 player? I initally tried with a various artist compilation cd. It came up as folders starting VARIOUS ARTIST > CLUBBED OUT DISC 1 > List of tracks. I then ripped CD2 but could not find it anywhere and think it may have overwrote cd1. I wiped the entire thing and started again, but using different cd's. Again I noticed them being stored in the format of ARTIST NAME > ALBUM NAME > track list. To avoid a repeat of albums from the same artist overwriting each other I cut the ALBUM NAME folder and pasted it in the main directory and then deleted the ARTIST NAME folder.
Will this interfere with the ability to select albums in the car?

Thanks for all your help.

When ripping compilation CDs (and before iTunes4 came along), I used to discard the separate CD naming, so it would come up as all one disc (track 1-20, 21-40 etc). Not sure if this will help you at all?

My lady bought me an 80GB iPod "classic" for Christmas last year (I also can't stand Apple products with a passion) and I think it's fantastic to use in a car... it also doesn't help that I prefer the AAC codec for music to MP3, and that's something that really only iTunes handles with any efficiency.

[tt82]

Yeah, it's all sorted now. When ripping the cd's, if i was doing a compilation album with 2 or more cd's, it gave it the ARTIST NAME as Various artist, I simply had to rename the folder before ripping the next cd otherwise, for some strange reason it overwrote the previous cd. It all works fantastically now, with my only grumble being that I soon used up the 8GB and should have gone for a larger capacity.

[berrymanuk]

Originally Posted by tt82

Yeah, it's all sorted now. When ripping the cd's, if i was doing a compilation album with 2 or more cd's, it gave it the ARTIST NAME as Various artist, I simply had to rename the folder before ripping the next cd otherwise, for some strange reason it overwrote the previous cd. It all works fantastically now, with my only grumble being that I soon used up the 8GB and should have gone for a larger capacity.

Lol yeah, 8GB isn't a lot. Did you store them as 128Kbps or 320Kpbs files? 32GB usb sticks are really cheap these days. Though saying that, I recently spent £40 on a 64GB microSD card for my Z10!

[tt82]

Yeah, 8GB doesn't seem a lot but then I thought I didn't have that many cd's. Though I reckon I have over 1,000 tracks stored on it now, maybe even close to 1,500. As it is, it was a £12 experiment which worked well. A similar 32gb player is only about £25 so I will invest in one of them eventually and use the 8gb at work.

[Philip Fisher]

Hello,

I have a 16gb stick with all my music as MP3 files saved on it and have this plugged in to the USB socket. Generally this works well and I get the folder/file structure displayed which allows me to progress through Artist, then Album, then song pretty easily.

I have just 2 questions:

1. I had all my music in mpeg4 format, but for my Audi I had to convert all this to MP3 format for the car to read it. So on my PC at home I have all my music as both mpeg4 and mp3. This makes putting new music on the PC a bit of a pain as I have to load and then convert to get the 2 file types. Will the Volvo read MPEG-4 files, or is it fussy like the Audi and will only read MP3's? It would be good to dispense with the need for MP3's.

2. When I loaded all my music in one go on to the stick it then displayed in the car in alphabetical order which worked well, the break at the bottom of the list seemed to be between M and N, not between Z and A, but I could live with that. However I have now loaded a few more artists on to the stick and these 4 folders appear all together down near the break in the list at M. Now this works well for Mumford and Sons, but not so good for Billy Joel, Eva Cassidy and Dido...... So the music folders seems to order themselves in date order that the folder was created, not alphabetical order. Does anyone know if this is the case and whether it is possible to force it to organise in a different way?

Many thanks

[tt82]

Not sure about the mpeg4, best read the manual or even just load one track on the disc in that format and see if it works. As the files, plug the stick back in your pc, and then go to edit > sort by > then choose name or whichever option you want.