[spinach88]

Picked up my brand new vivid blue i30 CRDi SLX this morning, bright and early of course!

Lovely car, as we all know.

Spent most of the morning playing around with the USB interface trying to get a handle on how it works, and optimising a 120GB Western Digital portable USB drive to work with it the easiest way.

My aim is to get it working with about 30GB of music on the drive. Here are some observations so far. If anyone has any useful comments, then please feel free to respond, I'd appreciate the help.

 - The WD HDD powers fine via the 500mA supply from the i30 USB port, but the startup time of the HDD is long enough that the i30 head unit does not recognise it quickly enough when the ignition is first switched to ACC. The outcome of this is that, if you are driving along listening to the music on the USB drive, then stop and turn the car off, when you get back in and turn the car on again, the head unit does not see the USB drive for a while, then when it comes online it thinks a new USB drive has just been plugged in, searches through it and plays the default first track again instead of continuing play from the last point.

 - When a small USB pen drive (the one that was supplied with the vehicle) is used, it commences play from the last point, as it is supposed to.

 - The initial search time when 30GB of music is first attached is very long, maybe just under a minute, though I don't see a way to improve this.

 - I have seen a report from someone else that they are able to access more than one partition on a drive. I don't seem to be able to do this at all. It always shows me only the files on the last (alphabetical drive letter, as Windows determines it) partition. How can it be made to see more than one partition?

 - The biggest problem I have with the interface is the fact that it does not seem to handle nested folders. By which I mean, if you store the mp3s of an album in a folder called "sergeant pepper" for example, then store that folder within a folder called "the beatles", then store that under a folder called "B", then when the i30 reads the USB drive, it assigns all the tracks in an album to a root directory, with only the album folder to differentiate them. Whilst this is fine if you only have a GB or two of music (as was intended I suppose when they designed the interface), if you have 30GB of music and want to jump from ACDC to Paul Simon (quite a large change in mood I will agree) then you have a lot of button-pushing to do, it will take you 5 minutes! By storing mp3s under the alphabetical letter of the band's name, it is quicker, but you may still have 300 or 400 songs to scroll through.... I am guessing they wanted an interface that was simple enough that people wouldn't get distracted whilst driving etc., and of course for a small data set it works great, but causes a problem with a large data set. Any solutions?
 
Cheers,

Benjamin/

[encountar]

Hey Benjamin,

I currently run a 4gb ipod nano in my car and only have 2 major gripes with it

i have about 400 ish songs and there is no "quick jump" to a specific letter in the alphabet and takes ages (i generally just put on random and keep pressing next till i hear a song i like)

the saving grace is of course, i can use my playlist... but i need to configure them and have been lazy


if anyone has any ideas on how to resolve either of this i'd be grateful
(im thinking a software patch for the first from Hyundai would be awsome)

[OMVanders]

Encounter
I discovered a way of increasing the MP3 volume, but it takes a bit of effort.
I use iTunes to 'backup' CD's etc and the import settings when files are converted and transferred into the library as Mp3's have to be maxxed rather than using the default settings.
It would seem that the higher the quaility of the Mp3 the greater the volume, cos' that's what has worked for me.  The higher quality versions are still a little down on volume compared to the same track played in the CD drive, but it's better than before.
Hope this helps.
OMV

[Dazzler]

Hi Spinach,

Thanks for that interesting 1st Post. By the way where are you from city/ state? Encountar is keeping a world map up to date with approximate member locations.

Monitor this thread for a couple of days and you should get some worthwhile feedback. Thumper and others have a good handle on these Hard-drives and their operation in the i30.

Keep in touch! Oh..and some pix please!

Cheers,

Dazz

[spinach88]

Hi Dazz,

I am from Melbourne, purchased the i30 from Essendon Hyundai.

I will keep checking back to see if any more useful info appears. I am an instrumentation engineer so I have already come up with some ideas to engineer a work-around solution to the issue of the USB drive not getting recognised initially, but not sure I will be bothered to work on this solution if there is no easier way to sort through the songs. With 32GB of data, it is just not feasible.

Maybe we should all write to Hyundai and suggest this as a feature for a future firmware upgrade?

benjamin/

[encountar]

Added Spinach in as being in essendon vic


anyways, bout to set off to work in the pouring rain.... will test a few things out and see if i cant squeeze soem extra vol from my ipod

[Dazzler]

No worries M8.. I only work from 1 to 5 today so amongst other things.. I'll try and buy an oil filter for my baby... and check with dealer again re: CPF  

[Thumper]

spinach88, I have EXACTLY the same issues with mine and a 160gig USB drive.

I have now 130gig of music, and have found that the i30 stereo can see the first and second level of folders, but any deeper, it can not 'see' them.

What I have done is made several folders (Techno, Dance, Ambient, Relax, 100% Hits, Audio Books) then shoved appropriate music under these folders.

As for the indexing time, yup, roughly 45 seconds.

Now, the issue of going to the first song every time it powers up. Grrrrr!  

[encountar]

Hey guys a little update, i changed a setting in my ipod with something about volume checking yay!!!

[Waja]

i noticed that if you use just the typical 3.5 audio cable (i think its that size) and plug it into the aux instead of using the actual ipod cable, the sound is alot weaker. also, i think what encountar is talking about is the volume limiting option in the ipod settings. that would make the biggest change.

also i noticed the folder problem while i use the usb input and so i did what thumper did as well, but i seperated mine into different moods for different times in the day =P but yeah...i think it really does need a firmware upgrade, but then again, when you start tohave too many folders, that would also have to mean that there would have to be an increase in time in order to find each individual nested folder...

but hopefully hyundai can work this out!