I’ve got a bit of an obsession with physical media, and backing it up to a beautifully curated flac and mp3 collection, tagged and album-art, all of it.
I’m coming from a 2013 Ford F-150 with the MyFord Touch (Sync2) in it, and it could handle anything I could fit on a 64GB memory stick…. literally 10k files at times… browse easily by artist, album, and song title, and the voice recognition worked suprisingly well for all of it (example: “play artist xxx” worked very well).
I’m also coming from a 2019 Honda CR-V with the non-upgraded audio. It also could handle just about everything the 2013 Ford could… although voice recognition was far sketchier, dash control wasn’t terrible.
And then Subaru… I’ve been through both a 2022 Outback and now the 2023 Ascent (I miss my OBXT terribly, but resigned to the fact that I needed more space in my “dad car” with ‘friends and family’ added to the passenger manifest). Both of them have the 11inch display/media center.
And OMFG were/are both of them abysmal.
Fantastic format support, to be fair… I was excited to see support for FLAC as well as other more modern formats.
Also extremely excited to see support for hard drives/SSDs instead of just thumb drives, as well as NTFS support for reliable and index-able large capacity support. 1TB portable SSD here I went! As per normal, I wanted it permanently connected, so set up a long cable with cable ties and stuff to make it all pretty to keep the SSD in the center armrest storage.
And then… and then… wow… just, absolutely terrible everything from a UX perspective.
- Maximum 5000 file system object inventory limit, including folders.
- Even when not using android auto, no ability to use the media player in split-screen mode with navigation… not even player controls or song title… just plain blank.
- Technically you can change the very top bar to a media player page that will show you either song information or back/forward (no pause or anything).
- Extremely limited indexing/sorting functionality. No reliable awareness of things like “albums”. You can play by folder to get around that somewhat, but folders count against the 5k object limit….
- Voice recognition for playing song/artist/album/whatever is absolutely abysmal.
There’s zero reason for an in-car basic media player experience to be this abysmal.
Yes, you can get around this by using a media player app on your connected phone, and keeping such collections on your phone… but honestly, that defeats the entire point of having something that, you know, doesn’t actually require the phone.
Rant over.
Have a great day!
