V60 Recharge Ultimate (my23) - Google Automotive is awful

[Harrydog01]

I have just picked up my V90 Cross Country. It has the B&W media system that is completely wasted on a Bluetooth device. I have tried AutoWagon but it doesn’t work for me. Apple CarPlay is hit and miss on my iPhone7 that I used as an iPod (sometimes works sometimes not). Pretty disappointed, as I have loads of usb thumb drives (ranging from 16-128gb) that have been used on my last 4 cars.
Not impressed with the system at all.

[ma42]

Harrydog01
Did Audiowagon give any error messages? ... what was not working?

[ma42]

Harrydog01
I found the developer of Audiowagon has a forum thread here:
https://www.polestar-forum.com/threa...s.3450/page-13

[giftgrub100]

Originally Posted by ma42

For some reason, although I can connect my Android phone OK, I can't stream music unless I initiate on the phone.
I don't use spotify or tidal or any other streaming service and I don't want to have advertising if using the free versions. I have a large collection of mp3s and, as I have in most previous cars of the last 15 years, want to continue to listen to my own collection. It isn't rocket science and I find it hard to believe or unreasonable to expect in a £50K+ car that it is such a problem to be able to use a USB port or for Volvo to provide an app to play mp3s from a flash drive.

I don't disagree and for something that should be so simple, they have made it such an awkward and frustrating system when it should be plug and play for a usb stick with music on it.

[James77]

Just for clarity what are the solutions for listening to music on AAOS does it have to be good old fashioned DAB radio or streaming via Spotify/Deezer or something similar? Can you play internet radio as with Alexa in your home just shout at it to play a radio station?

With Sensus it is a pain having to stamp all music for it to work via usb when every other car I've owned with a USB was simply plug in and get on with it!

[SnineT]

Do you guys think this is probably due to the pandemic playing havoc with the development of the system?

Obviously they had this in the pipe for some time before it's actual release but what with work from home and the draconian lockdown the Chinese endured coupled with I'd imagine Sweden went full New Zealand about it as well.

Seems strange for Google to be so far behind on this one as love em or hate em they are normally on the ball with improvements.

Not a lot of use though if you've spend 50/60k on a car and you get this, still on the upside at least you didn't buy an Octavia them guys have really experienced pain with the system Skoda put in it.

[ma42]

SnineT
my son works for a very large software house in the USA and his teams didn't skip a beat moving to home working. It's all about core competence, management and planning.

[Fibrous]

Originally Posted by Harrydog01

I have just picked up my V90 Cross Country. It has the B&W media system that is completely wasted on a Bluetooth device. I have tried AutoWagon but it doesn’t work for me. Apple CarPlay is hit and miss on my iPhone7 that I used as an iPod (sometimes works sometimes not). Pretty disappointed, as I have loads of usb thumb drives (ranging from 16-128gb) that have been used on my last 4 cars.
Not impressed with the system at all.

AudioWagon should work. Are the USB sticks FAT32 formatted? If you are having an issue contact the developer as he will want to know what's going on.
Having the B&W system particularly crys out for uncompressed audio and it is unbelievable there are no options offered by Volvo beyond paying for an HD audio stream service The only way is to use AudioWagon which will playback those uncompressed FLAC files fortunately.

[Harrydog01]

Thanks all. I spent the afternoon doing experiments.
1. 16gb full format FAT32. I put two .wav music files and a folder with two different tracks in. I got it to see and play the tracks.
2. 32gb fully formatted with about 500 tracks, not in folders. It took about 5mins to do whatever it does and then it played them, but no metadata except the song title. I then tried another 32gb FAT 32 drive that it didn’t see, swapped it back to the one that was playing and it then refused to see it.
3. I used an iPhone 13 with CarPlay and it was all good.
I am fairly disappointed, my 15 year old Mercedes, 10 year old Lexus and 5 year old Evoque all had no problem playing.wav music from a 128gb stick!

I hope no one is going to pay for the B&W upgrade as it is a complete waste of money using mp3 or Bluetooth.

[techwatcher]

Originally Posted by SnineT

Do you guys think this is probably due to the pandemic playing havoc with the development of the system?

My theory is that it's not related to the pandemic but the development work Volvo needed to do to support AAOS took (much) longer than anticipated, the hardware (MY22 cars) needed to be shipped so they shipped the software as it was at the time without a number of features.

Volvo seem to be slowly catching up.