Less than perfect experience with DICE iPod Integration

I installed the DICE iPod Integration kit on my 2005 Prius (no navigation, no JBL) last week. Thanks to posts on this forum which made the installation a piece of cake.

I set the unit to DICE mode, and started to exercise the unit from the controls on my steering wheel:

With 'DISC 1' selected, I was able to go to next and previous tracks by pressing on the up and down buttons on the steering wheel.

But when I selected 'DISC2' or 'DISC3' and pressed the buttons on the steering wheel, I got no response from the system.

I downgraded my iPod firmware from 1.1.2 to the recommended 1.1.1 revision, tried again, but got the same results.

I opened a trouble ticket at http://support.diceelectronics.com/ explaining the issue.

Since I got no response from them online, I called them this morning. I explained to the technician that I expected the unit to iterate through the album list by pressing the up and down buttons when 'DISC 3' is selected.

The support technician told me that the unit would go to next/previous album only within a playlist. He did not tell me why the system would not go to the next playlist when 'DISK 2' was selected. But he did tell me that I did not know how the iPod worked. :angry:

Is this how the DICE iPod integration is supposed to work? The DICE Kit's meager documentation seems to suggest that the up/down buttons on the steering wheel would have the unit iterate through all albums. Is this not true?

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(dgstan @ Jul 31 2006, 02:13 PM) [snapback]295241[/snapback]</div>

Thank you for your response.

I tried your suggestion with much better results:

I placed all tracks into a new playlist named 'All' (1393 tracks, 116 albums). I started playing the iPod from this playlist. With 'Disc 3' selected I was able to skip through albums in the playlist with some quirkiness:

I am not sure what is the significance of track number on the Prius display with 'Disk 3' selection. I assume it represents the album number in the playlist. As I advanced through the albums from the steering wheel, the track number after 62 started to jump around, it never went into 3 digits. Also, albums would repeat every so ofter before going through the entire list of albums.

I suspect that the Prius is able to handle upto 99 tracks/albums/playlists reliably (99 playlists x 99 Albums = A maximum of 9801 albums). It also suspect the ordering of tracks for each playlist in iTunes affects how the next album is selected in Prius.

Instead of creating one giant playlist, I decided to create a 'smart' playlist for each genre, and then sorted each playlist by album. I am now able to advance and recede through genre and albums by selecting 'Disc 2' and 'Disk 3' respectively. There is still some unpredictable behavior when I try to recede below 1.

Thanks again for you help.