To whom it may concern, the £175 Factory fitted iPod console "integration" within the Audi range is seen as questionable given Audi's attention to detail thoughout the rest of its product offerings.
The following items regarding the iPod integration functionality have been noted below by Audi-sport.net forum members.
Audi are requested to respond to to the comments below and advise what actions are currently undertaken to improve the fuctionality within the Audi head units, secifically noting that the RNS-E series are capable of suppoting user upgrades, where these issue could easily be resolved within the next map upgrade this year.
- Functionality is poor (limited to utilising existing Audi CD functionality as opposed to innovating to copy the iPod user interface)
- No track/artist/song/album info displayed in head unit (ID3 TAG's)
- Dire navigation - Functionality to skip through songs is linear rater than exponential, resulting in slow progression when skipping through long tracks (e.g. Podcasts). This effect is exasperated in that to scan through a 1 hour podcast the fast forward button on an RNS-E needs to be held for 1 minute, to scan through a 2 hour podcast the fast forward button must be held for just under 1 minute, allowing the counter to pass through 59:59 to 00:01 and then held again for a further minute.
- Display counter resets - Podcasts over 1 hour reset the track counter from 59:59 to 00:00 resulting in the second hour beginning from 00:00. The side effect of this functionality is it is impossible to know the location in the Podcast after 1 hour when resuming play on a different day.
- No direct menu access to songs via ID3 tags (except through 5 playlists which you have to setup on iTunes in advance) - Playlist 6 is noted to provide access to the entire music library but with no easy navigation mechanism, this is audiable but not visible by track/artist/genre name. This is direct contrast to RNS-E functionality for Radio stations which allows filtered by genre.
- Compatability - Doesn't work on latest iPod Nano and no date is available for future availability. Support is available for 3G models and later (noting the RNS-E userguide) however 2G models are noted as not being compatible, however these function normally.
- Poor reliability - e.g. if you are playing a song on playlist 3, and park up and switch off, upon return to the vehicle and restart, play will continue at the same song however the display will now show playlist 6, for no reason at all - despite the fact it continues playing playlist 3. This makes difficult navigation as the next track is playlist 6, and not Playlist 3.
- Functionality is depressingly slow - if you're on track 1 and want to get to track 50 in a playlist (which is a common thing to need to do because your entire music library has to be accessed from just 5 playlists!) it takes forever! There's a pause of about 2 seconds between the track number advancing, so no matter how quickly you press the "next track" button, you have to wait ages. advancing 50 tracks takes about 2 minutes of frantically pressing the next button. The RNS-E manual notes not advancing greater then 49 tracks at a time but provide no workaround to skip through large music libraries.
