For some reason my iPod (30GB Classic - old) is locking up after a while of playing through the car. I have it connected via the Y cable from Suncoast parts (both the USB and star port cable).

I am forced to reboot the iPod to fix the problem. Any idea what's going on with it?

On another note, I love that the Porsche emblem shows up on my iPod when its connected. Very cool!

 

Mine does that via my Dension 500, just reboot and enjoy the logo.

 

hah! So reboot every 20 minutes or so?

 

OK, that is bad.

Have you tried a different iPod? Or perhaps restoring the original settings and reload the music.

 

Im going to try this iPod in my friends 2009 997 today. Will let you know.

 

my ipod does that... like every 3-4 months... I can live with that!

 

It looks like it worked in my friends 997. On the way to work, so 30 minutes without freezing. I also noticed on my buddies car that when he pushes the "Source" button it shows Tuner, CD, USB, AUX, iPOD where with my car if the iPod is connected, it will not show the USB or AUX inputs on the source screen. So I'm wondering if he has a newer firmward on his system.

 

No, this is based on a PCM setting that allows you to specify whether you want to display sources whether you will use them or not. Hence you can "hide" sources you never use. The PCM is supposed to recognize a device that is plugged into a port whether that device is actually shown on the Source screen (it should always "discover" a plugged in device).

HOWEVER, if you do a PCM (Factory) reset I have noticed this discover function sometimes breaks and the car has to completely go to sleep before the discover function works correctly again.

(Another issue with the PCM is that if you have problems with a device (as described below) you must reset the PCM itself or it retains the old devie index even though it goes through the indexing process and "completes". A reset blows away the old index and allows the system to build a completely fresh one.)

On the main question...I have had many problems with PCM and my 5th gen "approved" ipod (charging, sporadic pcm reboots, PCM not seeing music that the ipod alone shows is there, resuming in the middle of a random song, etc.) as well as usb (same issues except for charging obviously). The dealership is no help as I have mentioned before (no tools to diagnose).

So this weekend I decided to troubleshoot. Decided to use the ipod as a USB memory device (enable "disk use"), loaded music, and then went back and forth with the ipod and a memory stick to trouble shoot. I found that the version of ID3 tag reading PCM 3.0 uses has a hard album art size limit. If this limit is exceeded the PCM will not index the music according to the tags (artist, album, genre) but WOULD show "unknown album" and then dump the tracks together (all the 01s, then all the 02s, etc.). Once I eliminated all the album art or got it down to the very small sizes (7k or 10k for example) that used to work on cell phones everything cleared up. All of a sudden the PCM would correctly index ALL the music on the drive and there were no more "unknown album" entries. Why too large album art breaks the PCM indexing system or causes sporadic operation is beyond me.

A side benefit to using the ipod as "just a USB drive" and not as a regular ipod is that the ipod stays charged when the car is turned off and charges when the car is on. Using either the straight ipod cable or the y-cable still allows the ipod to discharge when the car is turned off. Using just a usb cable works fine

Fingers crossed but so far the PCM has resumed correctly in the point of the song where it was stopped each time when the car was turned off (not resumed in some random song), I see all my music, all the tags show correctly, and the PCM hasn't rebooted or frozen.

 

It likely won't show USB unless you have a USB device plugged in (not sure if the y cable power tap leg is enough to trigger the PCM thinking there is a USB data source device there.

AUX, typically is harder to detect if there is something plugged in without a custom plug design or some dedicated sensing electronics in the socket side (ala iDevices)

 

Thanks for digging around on this. I will go through my thumbdrive and look at the ID3 tags and album artwork and clean things up.

Regarding the iPod, its not the PCM freezing up, but the iPod. So I need to figure out whats going on there. The iPod works fine on my friends 997 oddly enough.

 

Also make sure your PCM is up to date. I was told that v1.47 had numerous changes for ipod and other related issues but they couldn't give me specifics.

 

PCM 3.0 will show Ipod, USB or Aux if you set it to display such even with no device connected. It will hide Ipod, USB or Aux if you "uncheck" those items on a per item basis and no device is connected. It will recognize USB if it is set to hide USB but you plug in a USB device.

 

Is there a way to find out what PCM version I have?

 

So I've reset the PCM and reseated the Y-Cable and everything seems to be working fine now. I was have thumbdrive issues before too, and resetting the PCM seemed to fix that as well. It looks like the issue is around the PCM building the different music databases and resetting fixes that.

 

Yes, there is a way under the info button menu tree to get to the PCM info screen which will have a version number. If it has no version number its v 1.0, I think.