I recently found something curious – initially I thought GBMINI#5 had a German accent, but now I’m not quite so sure what accent it is!
Most of the NAV voice prompts are pre-recorded, but recently I heard the car announce the track number that was playing on my iPod – and it’s an accented computer generated voice:
So, what do you think? German? Something else?
To round out my opinions on the stereo system of the R56 with navigation, here’s a quick look at Sirius satellite radio. The factory system is very expensive, especially compared with a sub-$100 standalone receiver that you could connect to the AUX input … but with the factory system it’s fully integrated to the car, there’s no additional antenna on the roof, and you get your first year of service included.
When you access satellite radio, the NAV screen shows a list of all channels – every one has a check mark next to it, assuming you’ve activated the receiver. Seems a bit odd to show that; why not simply omit channels that aren’t available! But anyway, you get a list of channels and you can rotate the joystick to listen to any one – with less than 200 channels, it’s much easier than the iPod! You can call up a “Details” display for the channel you’re listening to, which shows the artist/title info – but nothing else!
I’m sure this would look fine on the non-NAV R56, but it looks a bit empty here. It would have been better to integrate with the channel list, like the iPod interface does.
You can set up a list of 12 presets for your favourite Sirius channels, you can also access the list by Genre if you wish – but personally I find the 12 presets sufficient to cover all I need, making it extremely easy to access the music I want to listen to.
One interesting feature is that the satellite radio seems to be “instant on”; when the car turns on the music is immediately playing – there’s no delay for a couple of seconds while the receiver powers up and syncs to the channel. I’m guessing that the receiver powers up when the car is unlocked, giving it a headstart, but however it’s done, it’s a noticeable improvement over non-factory solutions (and yes, 2 or 3 seconds isn’t much of a delay, but it’s better if the delay is zero!)
GBMINI#5 came with the iPod interface installed – good news because I’m not sure I’d have liked to pay $500+ for it!
In GBMINI#5, the iPod cable is installed into the “secret” storage space above the glovebox – you push the dash trim piece (firmly, in the center!) to open it, and inside is an iPod connection cable; like most iPod interfaces, the iPod goes “dead” when connected, just displaying a graphic and “OK to disconnect” screen (the storage area is rubber lined, and the cable helps to hold the iPod, so it doesn’t rattle around – good):
What’s so bad about that?
Well: notice first that we have “CD2” selected, and above we had “CD1” selected. The iPod interface is implemented by mimicking a CD changer; CD1 gives a menu of music in Playlist order, CD2 is Artists, CD3 is Albums, CD4 is Genres, CD5 is Podcasts and CD6 is All Songs.
So to get to the Artists list, I had to switch from CD1 to CD2; to do this you simply push the joystick up, a couple of times, then rotate, then click. But then comes the really “exciting” part … I had to wait EIGHTY SECONDS for the Artists menu to appear!
OK, so we want to listen to a different artist. How about Supertramp?
There’s no way to quickly jump to a specific letter of the alphabet, or even to move by more than one menu entry – the only choice is to rotate the joystick to go down through the Artists; this of course takes FOREVER (worse still because the display update is slower than the rotation speed!)
Luckily, it doesn’t take quite as long as you’d expect – cleverly, the iPod interface is limited to 255 menu entries! So we actually can’t get to Supertramp anyway; in fact the screen above with Lucero as the last item, is the end of the menus.
Alright then, how do we get to Supertramp?
Well, I could build lots of Playlists to set up different ways to access my music – maybe a Playlist for “A”, “B”, etc … but I saw someone post online that method doesn’t work because the menu gets overloaded and still runs out!
Plus, the menu is only one level deep – for example, here I accessed via CD4 / Genres and called up “Electronica”:
As you can see, what appears is just a list of songs. There’s no sub-menu of Artists or Albums first … it looks like the song list here is in Artist order (it’s displaying tracks by AudioBody), so I guess with enough knowledge of what’s in your iPod you might be able to scroll down the list to get to the song you want. Although I suspect the list of songs might still stop at 255 entries!
In the end, I’ve decided to use Random play which hopefully will give me a random choice from all the songs in the iPod:
Of course you have to be careful what you have selected – counter-intuitively, “Random All” apparently randomly selects from a subset of all music in the iPod, depending what you have selected; it acts more like you’d expect “Random Directory” to work …
Infuriatingly though, when it’s playing in Random mode, the skip previous/next buttons don’t skip to a different random track!
Suppose you have Random play active and it selects an Artist you don’t fancy listening to today. In GPMINI with the Alpine HU I click -> (next track) and get some new random song. But in GBMINI#5, if I click -> I get the next song from the same Artist/Album; exactly what I don’t want!
The only choice is to click the joystick to turn off Random play, then click again and turn it on again.
I really wish the iPod interface was better. It should be much faster (my Alpine/iPod interface is instantaneous when I select by Artist/Album/etc), and there should be no problem with having music collections of more than 255 Artists/Albums.
As it is, I don’t expect MINI to do anything different, and it will be hard for an aftermarket company to develop something – the MINI is becoming more and more proprietary and difficult to change.
I wonder if the non-NAV iPod interface is any better. Maybe it’s slow on the NAV because it has to display more on the bigger screen? I hope one day to try my iPod in a non-NAV R56.
As it stands, I probably would still have to spec this iPod interface in a future R56, since the only other choice is connecting via the AUX plug and using the iPod controls (and honestly, trying to wave your finger around the iPod controls while driving is much worse than using the R56 NAV joystick!)
But much better is out there; why can’t we have it?
(anyone seen that Ford / Microsoft car advert where the driver presses a button an SPEAKS the Artist name to get it to play? sounds wonderful!)
Oh, nearly forgot – one more ludicrous limitation of the R56 iPod interface!
It doesn’t remember where you are in the current playing track, when you turn the car off – well, if you switch off for a short time it does remember, but after a few minutes it will revert back to the beginning of the track when you come back to the car! That’s really annoying when you’re listening to a long track, and never get to the end of it.
M&I / GBMINI 
