Sync Tips and Tricks

[khenault]

I’ve found the Sync interface to be an effective tool. I wanted to share some of the tweaks I’ve found.

 

The main problem is that it’s way too chatty. To fix this use the voice command:

VOICE SETTINGS

then

INTERACTION MODE ADVANCED

 

You can further reduce it’s chattiness by turning prompts off with the voice command “PROMPTS OFF”. The problem with that is that if Sync mishears the name of the person you’re trying to dial, it will just dial it. I decided to leave prompts on so that Sync verifies who I want to call.

 

The next problem I noticed was that Sync didn’t find all my music. After some research I discovered that Sync is very picky. You MUST have Title, Artist, Album and Genre info in the ID3 tags on your MP3 files. Most of mine only had artists and title. I added “Unknown” in the missing fields, and now Sync finds all my music.

 

Here’s a good/free MP3 tag editor. http://mp3bookhelper.sourceforge.net/

 

I also decided that I didn’t want to leave my iPod in the car, and I didn’t want to remember to bring it with me. Sync works just as well with a USB thumb drive. I found that 16GB thumb drives are going for ~$50 on eBay. That way I can have ~300 hours of music that I can just leave in the car. Sync can handle M3U playlists, and the tool I listed above can also create these playlists.

 

The problem with the USB drive is you can’t use it to play songs with DRM on them. If you do have songs with DRM on them, you can remove it with Soundtaxi. You have to run Soundtaxi on a system that still has DRM rights to the file. http://www.soundtaxi.info/

 

When I tried to sync my phone’s address book with my car, I set it for automatic updates, then tried to do the initial synchronization. I got an error stating that this feature is not compatible with this phone. The manual states that not all features are compatible with all phone, so I figured I wouldn’t have this functionality. The next morning when I turned on my car, the radio displayed the message “AUTO DOWNLOAD”. Two minutes later the phone book in Sync was up to date. Very cool. The moral of the story, turn on automatic updates.

 

 

If you have any other tips for Sync, please post them in this thread.