iOs 5 and Music ID info not changing

Anyone else here have the same prob? When I upgraded my iPhone 4 to iOS 5, I started seeing track info on my 11 Prious IV screen, but the track ID info does not change on the screen when the iPhone goes to the next track (it changes on the iPhone 4). It will change if I manually move to the next track on the iPhone. Other BT Audio apps like Pandora work fine and change the ID info to match on the Prius screen.

Am I missing something here or is it a known prob?

Joel

 

I did some more investigation just now and here is what I found:

1. Pandora works great and will send the correct ID info to the Prius screen
2. For TuneInRadio, I tried a couple of radio stations and for the ones I checked, the "Album" ID will be the name of the radio station and not the name of the actual album which does display correctly on the iPhone 4 screen. The track position information is not correct and will continuously loops between 0s and 5s.
3. I played music with full ID tag information through the "Music app" (formally known as the iPod app). This time it was changing correctly on the screen. So I was puzzled. I did a bit more testing and found the issue - PLAYLISTS. On my iPhone 4, ID tag information when I transition between tracks on a playlist will not update. Is it just my particular playlist or can someone else confirm?

 

Does it work for you for playlists as well? (i.e., id tag info changes from track to track in a playlist)

 

I wonder what the difference is other than the fact I have an 2011 and y'all have 2010. I am hearing you have iPhone 4 playlists that will properly display ID tag information as it goes from track to track automatically. In my car with my iphone 4 on iOS5, the first track ID information will not change as it moves onto the next track (or subsequent tracks).

Is this something I should follow up with Apple or Toyota?

Joel

 

Made some more headway on this today and I'll report my final findings when I get a good handle on this. I called Apple and they never heard of the problem/issue. Next thing I noticed is I have three playlists on my iPhone 4 and two of them work and one does not. So I am going to first recreate the playlist that is faulty and see if that fixes the problem. If not, then my guess is it is something about the songs or probably the ID tags. In the playlist in question the "title" and the "album" are exactly the same - that could have something to do with it.

 

I figured out the problem why all but one of my playlists displayed information on the Prius screen correctly but one of them would play the music but the ID tags would never change - always displaying the first one (unless I manually changed the tracks).

Here is the scenario - highly unlikely for most commercial music. I am a composer with a concentration on film/tv scoring/arranging and orchestration. I create customized demo discs which I give away regularly. As I did not want to have to play the discs in the Prius CD player, I created a playlist on the iPhone 4 to correspond to my demo disc. Now CDs will obviously never have the problem above with those tracks. But what I did with the ID tags to insure that when they are not in a playlist, the iPhone4 just plays them an stops - I made the album and the title EXACTLY the same (also set the Genre and Artists to the same thing but the Prius won't display the Genre). This is the problem - the above issue will happen ONLY if you are advancing between songs where the title and album ID fields are identical. I changed the title for each track to be slightly different from the album and the problem disappeared.

At least now I know the workaround. But in my opinion, bluetooth audio players should always send the ID tags and have them displayed correct as each track ends and the next one begins - I would suggest this is a 'bug' no matter how 'essoteric' you would claim my methodology is. So tomorrow morning, I am going to call back Apple and suggest it is a bug and ask to have it fixed in a future release of iOs. Not sure how successful I will be but I'll give it a try.

 

Postscript - one may ask, "You don't have to have the title and album ID field to be the same for the song to be played and then the iPhone stops. All you need is a unique album name for every title".

I would answer that the above statement is true. But the reason I did it, I guess, was that it was easier to do it that way since I was using a utility called, "Tag & Rename" in Windows Vista to set up my ID fields based on the name of the filename associated with the track and it was just easier to make those two fields exactly the same as the filename than having to make the title somehow different.