Lots of opinions and speculation but has anyone gotten ahold of an adapter and tried it with an AMI cable and an iPhone 5 in an Audi yet? Until that happens, it's all just vaporware.

 

Here's the response I got from Audi customer support...

Thank you again for taking the time to contact Audi of America in regard to the availability of a compatible Audi Music Interface (AMI) cord to use in your 2012 Audi A7 3.0 quattro. I appreciate you allowing me the opportunity to assist you. I have researched your inquiry further. Please accept this written response.

We are aware that the newly released iPhone 5 has a new charger/cord input compared to previous iPhone models. Since the iPhone 5 was recently released, unfortunately we have not developed a compatible cord to use in our models yet. This may take a while to produce and make available to sell at our authorized Audi dealers as the iPhone 5 was not available to us to test and design an AMI cord until it was released. In the meantime, we are currently testing for Bluetooth phone compatibility to stream audio and/or to make and receive phone calls hands-free as an alternative until an AMI cord is available.

A number of Bluetooth-compatible phones can be used in conjunction with Audi functionality. You can find the listing for current phones on the website at Experience>Innovation>Bluetooth, or by using the following link on the Audi USA website:

http://www.audiusa.com/us/brand/en/e...onnection.html

This list is periodically updated as new models are tested and added. Since the iPhone 5 has not been tested for compatibility yet, you may experience connectivity concerns.

Once the AMI cord becomes available, this accessory can either be purchased through the Audi Collection at http://www.audi-collection.com/ or through your local Audi dealership.

 

I can't be bothered to plug in my iPhone every time I get in the car, so I just connect it using bluetooth audio. Granted you give up browse for the Music app, though for Pandora and TuneIn it doesn't really matter, and pause/play and skip do work (as of iOS 5 it senda all the music metadata to the MMI, which is nice). And, if you use the new iOS 6 turn-by-turn maps it turns down the music when it wants to give directions. (Despite some data issues, the turn-by-turn seems to do a better job of handling traffic data than the mmi nav.)

In my opinion bluetooth audio sounds better -- I'm guessing because it avoids an extra sound-killing digital-to-analog-digital conversion that happens when you use the aux out on an iPhone/iPod. (ie, the iPod converts from digital to analog, sends it out the aux jack to the MMI which converts it back to digital then sends it through the B&O DSP for processing before converting it again back to analog.) It seems that Bluetooth audio keeps everything in the digital domain.

Since my music collection is much larger than I can fit on a phone, I use a USB-powered hard drive plugged into the MMI (much cheaper/GB than an iPod). The MMI USB interface does a couple of things the iPod/iPhone interface doesn't do -- it supports album art (image must be less than 800 x 800) and also can play back certain formats of video. The specifics of the format are in the MMI manual and I have successfully created video files using Handbrake on the Mac that play on the MMI system. I suggest 320kbs AAC format for the music files. You have to manually manage sync (as opposed to using iTunes), but I use Chronosync on the Mac to do this. There is also a utility called Playlist Export in the AppStore that can convert iTunes playlists to ones that work on MMI.

Again, using a USB drive means that the B&O (or BOSE) system is doing the digital-to-analog conversion...

 

I was going to use a USB powered drive when I first got my A7 but Audi USA confirmed a file limit of 3000 files (songs) readable by the MMI. That number is way below what my music library is, so I was wondering if you've run into a problem where the MMI doesn't recognize any files after 3000? Others on the Q5 forum have I have seen.

Still would rather go the USB drive route than using the two 32gb sd cards, although right now that is the best sonic/file hierarchy way to go...the jukebox just makes a mess of things..bad handling of ID3 tags.

Any input is greatly appreciated. Thanks!

 

I could be wrong, but I thought the 3,000 song limit is for a single folder. I have over 5,000 songs in my library and they all seem to appear in the MMI. I organize by genre->artist->album, so no folder has many songs in it.

 

I was under the impression it was any single source, not folder that was limited to 3000 files. Glad to hear it's not an issue with you, I may now revisit getting that USB drive! By the way, which brand/size drive are you using?

Thanks again.

 

I think I used a leftover 160GB 2.5" disk from a Macbook that I upgraded. I put it in an Acomdata enclosure I got for $20 from amazon (mini USB). Sometimes the navigation from the MMI is not all that zippy, so out of curiosity I once tried an SSD drive to see if that would help. It didn't make any difference -- so it must be constrained by the MMI processor rather than the disk io speed.

Of course, you'll need to get an MMI-mini USB cable from Audi...

 

Hey guys, not sure if this is the right place to post this, but I finally received my 30-pin to Lightning adapter for my iPhone 5 today. I have a 2012 A6.






The good news is I can control my music (change playlists, pick songs) via the MMI. Pandora plays as well, although no control via MMI (controlled by the phone).

The bad news is that most of my songs are missing. In fact, it seems to detect only 25 songs from my first playlist (which I named "AAA") The other playlists are therefore showing "The directory does not contain any playable files". Some playlists show a few songs, but only because these same songs are also present in the first playlist.

I've tried moving more songs into the "AAA" playlist to see if it's just some sort of playlist-specific error, but nope -- only the first 25 songs seem to load. I even tried reordering the songs via my iPhone to see if it might be an order-specific issue, but that hasn't yielded any results either.

I've also tried restarting the phone and restarting MMI (menu + center **** + upper right button) numerous times.

As you can see I'm grasping at straws now. Anybody else had a successful experience with the adapter? Hate to fall back to BT streaming as I'd prefer to control things via the MMI.

 

AZNBBJ,

Congrats on getting the adapter.

I'm glad to hear that the sound is passing thru.

It seems weird that some of the songs are missing. Are they missing in certain playlists? if you browse by Artist or Album are track missing as well?

Are the tracks in your playlist a mix of Mp3 and AAC -- and if so is only one of those formats showing up?
Is is also a possibility the bit rate of certain tracks is too high/low.

Sorry for the questions -- I won't get my adapter until next week and am anxious to know if it will really work. Just preparing myself....

 

Hey jfischetti, no worries on all the questions. Anything to get to the bottom of this.

Good news -- I figured it out. I feel like a bit of a bonehead now, as it has nothing to do with the Lightning adapter. It was due to iCloud.

I use iCloud to store all my iTunes music and sync it with other devices. The songs that weren't playing were all still in the cloud and therefore weren't store locally on the phone. Conversely, the MMI was only detecting songs that were stored on the phone.

To "fix" this, all I had to do was go to the bottom of each playlist in my iPhone and tap the iCloud button (it's a cloud with a down arrow):



So, I imagine this is only an issue for people using iCloud in the way I am.

So, to recap, this had nothing to do with the Lightning-to-30-pin adapter. The reason I didn't notice this before with MMI was that my previous phone -- an iPhone 4 -- was not set up with iCloud (all songs were already stored in the phone).

Hope that helps!