Hey everyone. My wife has had the BMW iPod interface in her car for a few months now. She has noticed that the car seems to play the same songs very frequently. For example, yesterday, she was playing a playlist with about 80 songs in it. She the same song twice over the course of three songs! In other words, she heard song "A" then song "B" and then song "A" again. Other times, the promblem is not as extreme, but it seems that only a subset of the playlist is actually being selected and shuffled/randomized. The interface is in "random all" mode. Is anyone else experiencing this? Are there any fixes?

 

I can't guarantee that this is your issue, but there are postings on this and other web sites that indicate that upgrading to Apple's 1.2 firmware on the iPod (which is a result of upgrading to iTunes 7 on your computer, I believe) breaks the random shuffle feature with the BMW integration. At least this has been my experience.... If your iPod is running 1.2 and you select a playlist and then choose to "play random," my iPod plays the 1st song, shuffles to a random song, and then plays every other song in order from the random point.... Your situation sounds a little different but maybe knopwing this quirk will cause you to re0evaluate what is really happening....

I don't know who to complain to at Apple or who to complain to at BMW but this really pisses me off and I feel like I wasted a great deal of money in the process. The Shuffle feature is why I like the iPod in the first place.

 

My issue may be caused by the same thing, I don't know. . . I did update the firmware on the iPod, so it definitely could be the problem.

I also feel very disappointed with the product. On top of the slow access and search time and limited size of playlists the lack of a real functioning shuffle SUCKS! For such an expensive accessory, it needs to work properly. Either BMW should have deferred its release until they got it correct, or they should charge substantially less money for it.