Playing music in the best and most convenient way / MDI issues...

Ah just got my Golf 7 last week and came across this forum. Great to see so much sharing of knowledge. I'm loving the care, a huge upgrade since I came from a Peugeot 208 1.0 Great drive, the finish of everything is exceptional and although I just got the 105BHP 1.2, it's fast enough! I got it in Pacific Blue which looks amazing.

Sound quality was the most important thing for me in choosing a new car and the Dynaudio option got me interested in the first place to get the Golf, the rest of the car convinced me to get it!

The sound quality of the system is great but there are a lot of software issues which right now makes me enjoy it a bit less than I expected.

The fade-in / fade-out when playing from SD is really annoying and makes me not want to use this way to play music. Missing out on the first second of a song sucks just because somebody thought adding this was a good idea... Once you hear it you can never unhear it

The MDI to iPhone 5 cable solution isn't that great either as the DAC converter built into the Volkswagen cable makes everything sound a bit harsh in my opinion. It also doesn't control Spotify (skipping, track info) when I use the cable. It does sound a lot better when I connect the iPhone 4S to the MDI but this isn't a great solution as I don't keep too much music on this phone (only 16GB). Any others share this experience when using the Lightning MDI cable with a Dynaudio setup?

Right now I am considering to buy an iPod Classic to play my music in high quality through MDI as it still uses the dock connection and has lots of storage. I plan to just use the Bluetooth for Spotify from the iPhone 5.

Any other potential solutions I might be missing out on?

Just for comparison, the Peugeot 208 system has 2 USB ports which both work flawlessly with normal Apple iPhone Lightning and dock cables, USB sticks, harddrives and controling Spotify when using a cable connection is also possible. If only Volkswagen would move away from MDI and this would be the perfect car!

Cheers!

One observation - iPod Classic won't display album artwork. I ended up buying an iPod touch as my dedicated music source playing through the MDI-Lightning connector with the green collar.

testcard said:

One observation - iPod Classic won't display album artwork. I ended up buying an iPod touch as my dedicated music source playing through the MDI-Lightning connector with the green collar.

Click to expand...

It definitely does as all my music is stored on an iPod Classic connected to MDI. For those tracks with album art that is compliant with the Golf I see the album art on the display. I suspect either the wrong cable is being used to get album art or all your album art images are too big.

SD card all day long for me.

I don't get the fade in/out thing - all tracks are played as filed. Maybe Discover NAV is different in this respect. I don't know.

All album art is displayed - after a bit of sorting. Artists/albums/tracks are easilly accessed. The card just stays in it's slot, out of sight and permanently connected, unless I want to add something.

The only cable I carry is an iPhone cable, with a Belkin USB adaptor in the power socket, for when my phone needs charging.

If using an Ipod Touch 4 or 5, you need to use this part: Ipod ID3 - Tagging Adaptor Media in 000 051 446 M. This seem to work with any artwork and connects the Ipod instantly with the MFD.

Does anyone know if the cable solution above works with Spotify? That is to say, does the cable manage to get the album art over? I'm looking for a permanent solution for my Discover Pro with Spotify. So far I'm using it via Bluetooth from my phone but that's not getting anything across apart from the music itself and track skip and pause from the head unit.

In South Africa we can't get Spotify but I use Tunein Radio. I use the optional Media In cable for my iPhone 6. It works except that the display (title and album art) does not change when a new song is played. (It is stuck on the first song). Does anyone else experience this issue? I thought a firmware upgrade would solve it but VW says I am already running the latest upgrade.

I have given up on the MDI cable. It's not as functional as I would have liked it to be.

I have come to terms with the SD card and think it's a much more convenient way of listening to music. Get a decent size card and you're good to go. No plugging and unplugging all the time. SD FTW

I had an old iPhone 3G which I decided to have a bash with. Using the correct media cable I couldn't get it to see the Spotify tracks at all. Over Bluetooth they played but there was no artist and title information and no album art - just the same as my regular Android phone. I don't know if a newer iPod Touch would perform any better.

Further update - tried my daughter's iPhone 5C. Didn't have an MDI cable with a lightning connector so we used Bluetooth. That got the artist, track name and album name over onto the display. Gracenote then had a bash at the album art which it got right in about 75% of cases.

I have a classic which holds all my music and my phone which holds my playlists. I sometimes switch between Bluetooth and the classic, but I've found Bluetooth to be the best as I can still access voice control to my phone (which is loads better than VW...)

GoTime said:

I have given up on the MDI cable. It's not as functional as I would have liked it to be.

I have come to terms with the SD card and think it's a much more convenient way of listening to music. Get a decent size card and you're good to go. No plugging and unplugging all the time. SD FTW

Click to expand...

Yep got to be the best way, put music on card, put card in car, and forget about it, all for a tiny bit of wonga.