Voice commands stopped working (only for iPod)

[machoman1337]

I currently have a 2009 iPod Touch 2nd gen inside my car that I play music from. A week ago I removed it to load on some new songs, and then the voice commands (e.g. "Play King Harvest" to play all tracks by King Harvest) started working intermittently, then stopped working altogether. If I press the voice button and say "Play King Harvest", it will respond by saying "Playing artist King Harvest", but the screen will show that an "unknown title" is presently paused. If I press play, it goes back to whatever song was playing before I did the voice command. Music still plays fine, just that I can't manually select the songs without using the touch screen, which is very annoying.

 

I've tested the voice commands for phone and navigation and they work fine. I tried replacing the iPod cable and rebuilding the media index. Didn't work.

 

Anyone have any ideas? I do not want to do a factory reset if possible since the rest of the system works fine.

[jeff_h]

You noted that you removed it to load some new songs, maybe some of the songs that were added are not tagged correctly and don't index properly. Have you run syncmyitunes on your library?

[machoman1337]

You noted that you removed it to load some new songs, maybe some of the songs that were added are not tagged correctly and don't index properly. Have you run syncmyitunes on your library?

 

Never heard of that until you mentioned it. I'll run it later and see if my voice commands are fixed. Thanks for the suggestion.

[machoman1337]

Update: Thank you so much jeff_h. I ran sync my itunes as you recommended and everything works great now! It turns out that my new tracks had some tagging issues indeed, which Sync My iTunes corrected.

[higheroctave32]

I ran SyncMyiTunes the other day and it still indexes forever and will not stop.

[machoman1337]

I ran SyncMyiTunes the other day and it still indexes forever and will not stop.

 

Do you have songs whose ID3 tagging info is in a language that doesn't use Latin characters? I have some Chinese music that SyncMyiTunes won't work on. I decided to just not put those tracks on my iPod to avoid indexing problems.

 

As a bonus, SyncMyiTunes also fixed an earlier problem I didn't mention - being unable to play songs by saying the track name in the voice command (before, I could only choose the artist name). Now the voice commands are so powerful, it's like I got a new car :D

[higheroctave32]

I suppose it's possible. I have a lot of downloaded music from the Napster/Limewire/BearShare days along with a ton of my ripped CD stuff. I will take a look and see if anything pops out. Usually those things are in the "Comments" section, so I'll go in and do a "get info" and put in something like iTunes in that box and shotgun change everything that may be there. I'm a bit anal about everything else being correct, such as Title/album/artist so that may do it.

Thanks for the suggestion.

Edited September 22, 2014 by higheroctave32

[higheroctave32]

Well I took it a step further. I went and did the Get Info and changed all the comments to a generic "iTunes" text, then decided to really go for it. I used the built in id3 editing function in iTunes to completely strip all id3 tag information from every song, then put it back from the basic song info. I lost all the album artwork of course, but that's ok as I use my phone these days for music and just want to leave the ipod plugged into the usb in the car to have voice control over music, which I can't do over BTAudio, and putting music on an SD or jump drive sounds like crud. I got most of the cover art back through iTunes and it has been syncing for the better part of 45 minutes now copying everything back like new songs. I will report how it works and if that solves the never ending indexing issue many of us have had and are having.

[higheroctave32]

Indexing.............. Sigh.