Had my Ipod working great all week and then I realized I did not hook up the USB on the Y cable. Should have read the threads here but I hooked it up at the dealer and didn't look back.

When the Ipod ran out of juice the PCM no longer recognized it. I tried all manner of solutions after plugging in the USB but nothing worked. Then I read on the forum about the PCM not recognizing a powered down IPOD. That gave me the idea that the Ipod might just need a bit of a charge before the PCM recognized it. I fully charged it on the AC cord and voila plugged it into the car and everything went back to 100% function. I think the PCM needs a charged IPOD before it will recognize it. Once recognized it may work with a non fully discharged battery but once the IPOD loses all juice then you gotta bring it back to 100% or at least that worked for me.

 

The PCM tends to only offer options for devices it sees and could detect. Though there is an configuration you can set to always show the option in the choices when you rotate through with DISC, so you could set it to always give the ipod option, even when there isn't one detected.

If the ipod has no juice, it will not show up electrically on the interface of course. Its got to have enough juice to run. So if you have it plugged in right to be able to charge, the ipod will charge from dead and eventually power up... you should not have to charge via an outlet. Now if you have the new USB only charging i-devices and don't plug in the USB part of the split cable, then it won't magically charge. I've had my older ipod that only needs the firewire charging, drain to dead (because thats the way the PCM by Porsche implements the interface) from the car sitting and the ipod not being able to sleep, and then once the car is on and the 12v charge power is there, it charges and re-enables the ipod.

 

Well the damn thing gave out again today. Lasted for a couple of hours then no more recognition of the IPOD. Weird problem. I bought a new Ipod Touch thinking it might be my classic model giving it trouble but that didn't work either.

I am calling the dealer Monday. Could it have anything to do with my V1 install? The V1 is on a separate fuse and I can't fathom why it would give me a problem.

 

Gonna assume I have a bad Y cable. Upon delivery my screen would flash Ipod not ready but it never seemed to affect playback. I have since tried 5 different models/generations of Ipod and non seem to work going all the way back to my click wheel model.

The intermittency makes me believe it must be a cable issue that finally went south in the last few days. My car is a 2011 with a software version in the 2.? range so I assume the PCM software is most current.

 

The ipod/universal audio interface is buggy...I have had the battery drain issue with an ipod classic and they replaced the PCM. (Constantly waking up the ipod when the car is off such that the ipod battery drains.) Everything worked OK for about two weeks and then went back to the same issues. My software had been updated to 1.4 and they tell me there is no further update. So I switched to USB and it works fine except that every once in a while (no pattern, could be days, could be a week) when starting the car, it begins again in the middle of a completely different song nowhere near in the list/album. The other annoyance of course is that the car reindexes EVERY time you start it and on a large usb stick that indexing takes a while. The ipod is much better in this regard. (I am near the point of using the aux in and my phone since the sound out from it is pretty darn good and I can play flac files this way.)

 

Was a bad cable. Tried a new one at dealer and worked great. My experience with these dual mode type cables is if they aren't manufactured well they will fail. I have used several types in the past (roadshow most recent) and they all fail after a certain time. I would buy a couple extra and keep them in the home spare stock kit.

 

What is sad is that since 2009, to today, Porsche has not fixed the interface to add a 5vDC charge pin via a new DIN connector, and is still relying on using the USB port for 5vDC, which blocks the port and you cannot use a memory stick.

I'm mostly running with a 4gb dvd-r with my MP3s stored on it. Not sure if dual layer is supported, but could get 8gb then. its sufficient.

The problem of the interface not allowing the ipod to sleep is a big problem... very odd that they don't fix this, which is easy enough... just look at how other manufacturers do it.

 

minok-- yes, pcm 3.0 dvd drive supports double layer, double density to 8gb. I have tried this up to that level and it works. That being said, I have had the pcm completely slow to a crawl once when I was testing this. So much so that I could see the voice control icon and other parts of the system act kind of like they were in slow motion...like someone put debug spacers in the code and I tripped it somehow. After this happened and a couple of other times when the system would spontaneously reboot I switched to 64gb flash. As mentioned they completely replaced the pcm so I don't know if this new one has that same behavior as I did not try dvd since then.

 

This is good info as I haven't tried to use my ipod yet. Thanks

 

That's why real-world appliances should have a real-time operating system running the show... so bogged down applications (such as DVD playback) cannot bog down the whole system and bring other things to a halt. They get their maximum allotted piece of the pie and if they try to expand beyond that, the OS chops them off... so only the DVD playback would be affected, but the rest of the PCM would still work as expected.

I'll have to try out DVD DL at some point. I think with one of those, I could put all of the music I'd want to listen to on one DVD DL.

 

DVD discs are slow to be played back. Use the USB drive. They can be accessed much quicker by the PCM.

 

I've not had any issues with my DVD with ~4GB (single layer) worth of mp3's on it.
No problems with my memory stick either.

With home DVD media you have other variables such as the quality of the recordable media, the variant (DVD+R or -R or +RW or -RW and the manufacturer), the storage and handling (warping, scratching)... so not all issues related to DVD playback are the fault of the DVD media player drive and its software.

 

When you use a DVD disc, it takes a while for PCM to read the disc when you first start it up. Once it's started up, there is no problem playing it back. That was my point. The USB drive starts up much quicker.

 

Ipod and aux player are fastest

Ipod plays and indexes immediately

Aux player (phone) plays and indexes immediately but control of aux player is all hands

Usb plays fairly quickly but index time depends on size of stick. Play lag can be minimized by opening driver side door first if say you need to use the trunk or put something in the passenger side as this starts the boot sequence. The way to find and select music when it is still indexing is to use the folder up arrow at the top of the track list to work back up to the band list and select back down thru the file structure (if it is organized this way)

DVD/CD is slowest (ALFM) but given the relatively low storage capacity of optical disc compared to ipod, usb, or phone indexing can be faster than very high capacity usb.

 

But even my big 4g DVD is playing by the time I've backed out of my garage and am moving forward down the road. Maybe 30-45 seconds after inserting the key. Not an issue for me, but your tastes can vary. I put my key in before I get in.