Pixelthing.

I’m getting used to the Turbo lag a bit. Rather than a sudden gush of push, it’s a builder, so after the initial disappointment when you stomp on the gas, you find yourself surprised at the way the it seems to get stronger as the revs grow faster than you expect.

Not that I’ve actually managed to get it into fith gear yet, dropping M at work in Finchley is hardly a prolonged test.

On the techy side, it’s pluses and minuses. The Sound system is really very good, although the lack of engine noise and crashes helps (compared to my Smart Roadster – YMMV). With Bass and treble set to +-zero, it does seem to be tuned as if it has a loudness button, in that it has plenty of treble and decent bass (if a bit flat), but not much mid-range. Not hi-fi, but definitely a happy sound. I need to stick more music through it to figure it out some more.

I managed to get the iPhone (3G, firmware v2.2.1) to sync up via bluetooth fine with the car, and it attempts to call, but hasn’t managed it so far, so a little testing to go there (just a warning, iPhone firmware v2.0 broke compatibility, but v2.2 brought it back). The iPhone (connected by USB) isn’t recognised as a music source at all by Fiat’s Blue & Me car media system, and that seems to be for a couple of reasons. Firstly, Blue and Me only recognises Windows formatted FAT drives, which means if you have an ipod, you’d have to have set it up on a Windows PC initially (rules me out straight away). Secondly, although windows formatted iPods do supposedly work, iPhones apparently do not anyway (as of this post anyway), probably because the Blue & Me system was built to interrogate the old style iPod OS, while the Apple OSX Touch OS in the iPhone and iPod Touch are radically different.

The truth is, even if I was able to plug-in my iPhone to the car and play the music, I wouldn’t be able to play much, as it doesn’t support AAC, only MP3 and WMV, and as I only went back to ripping CDs in MP3 a short while back (for just this reason), and have bought many tracks from the iTunes store in AAC, I’d be a bit stuck for big chunks of my collection. Time to do some re-ripping.

It seems a completely ridiculous state of affairs that even though it’s a modern Windows CE branded system, it doesn’t support the open AAC standard (like many windows music players do), it can’t read an iPod filesystem, and can’t interface with the most common smartphone/music player on the market, but there you go. The Blue & Me system is software upgradable, so I suppose this state of affairs could change, but I’m not holding my breath. A £20 iPod dock is smarter than the Blue & Me media player if you are part if the iTunes economy.

The work around is pretty simple, although finessing the details took a bit of investigation. The simple answer is to use a standard USB stick/thumb drive, format it in FAT32, load it up with MP3 files and leave it in the car.

Of course, I don’t find it *that* simple, as the main point of playing digital audio in the car is to listen to the latest podcasts that I might have downloaded just as I’m leaving the house. This would be fine if iTunes could sync to a thumb drive just as it can with an iPod, but it can’t, and although there’s a windows itunes plug-in to do just this (allegedly), there’s nothing on the Mac.

But that wasn’t going to stop me.

I set up a couple of smart playlists in iTunes (one for podcasts – ie, Podcast=true, and one for music), gave them a limit (3GB for music while podcasts couldn’t exceed 1GB and had to have been downloaded in the previous two weeks), and copied the contents onto corresponding folders on the USB stick. Then I’m using an applescript:

http://dougscripts.com/itunes/scripts/ss.php?sp=syncplaylistfilestofolder

…to sync up the smart playlists with the folders USB stick. It takes a little bit of editing and it’s not as fast as natively syncing to your iPod, but it might just work for my purposes. For reference, it seems to be able to check through 1GB of podcasts in about a minute, but checking through 3GB of music is more like five minutes on my Macbook. We’ll see if it works out for me, having to sync my iPhone AND a thumb drive might be a bit over-awkward. If only there was a simple 3.5mm headphone jack for the header unit. An alternative I thought about was trying to source an old style iPod shuffle first gen – the stick one – if that worked with Blue & Me, I could let iTunes sync the podcasts with it as normal, plug it in and go…