Who has mygig? What are your experiences with it?

It is one of the big reasons I am buying this car, but I have been somewhat disappointed by some of the stuff I have seen when playing with it at the dealer. It seems to take forever to burn a CD, and it seems to be missing some critical features (like stop!?), although admittedly I don't know ALL the features.

Also curious, is it easier to burn CDs directly, or to copy them to a USB device and upload them, or to copy them from an iPod/mp3 player.

Any thoughts at all would be appreciated.

 

I like it, overall.

Copying a CD to the hard drive is slow at best. Copying a DVD is also slow - but seems to transfer the "net value" of songs faster.

There seems to be no "song by song" delete/rename options - which is disapointing, and the folder transfer is less than intelligent.

If I put in a USB key that contains anything other than just music - it fails to function. Storing pictures is almost useless - in fact it kind of is useless. It doesnt let you set a screensaver for the whole device - just a thumbnail on the play screen.

No pause was rather disconcerning etc.

The good: It is an awsome looking, passenger friendly, feature to have in the car - I am very happy I chose it - because it completes what I think would have been a very plain dash. It brings up the "scale" of the car to a higher end vehicle - just by appearance, and lets face it - satelite radio is awsome, touch screen sat? Even cooler!

As for saving music in the car! Hell yes! I have all my friends making me a CD with songs they want in the car, under their own playlist, and they love it.

If you drive people around or tend to volunteer for that role - guess what - prepare to be loved!

 

Personally I love the radio and it absolutely makesan otherwise normal (Boring) car interiormore excitingand feature rich but you definitely called some of the main lacking features..
No stop/pause button, no next/prev on screen buttons,slow rip times, nearly no song/playlist modification (You can delete single songs but the menu is hidden and you can delete/rename playlists), The unit corrupts easily..I have had the unit freak out and not play audio 3 times.. Just take it out and unplug it then plug it back in to fix these issues instead of bringing it to the dealer (Takes under 10 min), and I wouldn't say it has the most user friendly menus only because they are scattered in an illogical order or can be difficult to find the menu that you want sometimes. oh and some assmonkey at Dodge assumed that people can't watch DVDs and drive at the same time without letting us find out for ourselves first.. But that's pretty well covered in another post on these forums
I find when using the song list they are a little too big and I think they could have fit more than 3 songs on the screen at a time.
The unit is kind of slow to react to a song change/screen loadas well.
No line out RCA Jacks.

Those are just my complaints.. Aside of those the radio is awesome and I would tell anyone that is planning on buying a car with MyGig as an option to definitely get it as all in all the complaints are things I can live with.. (Well except the no DVD while driving)

I usually copy songs to it via USB and have only used a CD once so I don't remember which was faster.

 

By the way, The song delete menu can be reached by the following sequence of menus:
Push the Menu Button
Select My Files
Select My Music
Select My Playlists
Edit (Playlist)
Select Delete Songs From This playlist
Check the songs you want deleted, then click the on screen Delete Button

Which also illustrates my previous point that the menus are not really set up to be user friendly.. I think it would be much less distracting to watch a DVD while driving than to click on all that junk to delete a sucky song while driving

 

With regards to the U-Connect phone synchronization, unfortunately, there is no way to download the address book from your phone to the system. All of the entries have to be manually added. I found this out the hard way, and ended up calling the manufacturer who confirmed that this will not work with this system - even though it is clearly stated in the owner's manual that it will work. This is for the MyGig system with navigation, which is manufactured by Harman Becker and was factory installed in the '08 Avenger R/T.

 

I purchased a 2009 Dodge Journey w/the MyGIG system and I must say I'm quite disappointed.

First, it was advertised as 30GB... but a little over 10GB is used for "system" use. What a bunch of BS...

Next, I loaded about 1500 MP3's onto the MyGIG... the nice thing here is that if you put the music in folders on your thumb drive, they'll be imported into playlists of the same name! That was great... but... if you have a huge playlist you'll be frustrated trying to get to the last track. Let's say your playlist has 300 songs in it and you want to scroll to a track starting with Z... good luck turning that darn **** endlessly to get to the last track. Chances are you'll spin it too fast and MyGIG will become confused and say "<unknown>" for the title names you're scrolling through and then throw you back at the top of the list for another round of spin the ****.... and you'll have the same problem. The only way to successfully get to the last track would be to wait about 2 minutes for all the titles to load and then you won't have the "unknown" track name problem.

I also like to listen to audio-books (MP3 format) in the car and found that sometimes, when I press the REW button to back up a few seconds, the radio gets confused and then just advances to the next track w/o warning. With a song, this is easy to tell... but with an audio book... woah! Talk about confusing the few times it happened! Quite frustrating...

The Nav computer seems to have issues as well... I'm driving down the freeway and select POI to locate restaurants... it says there's like 80 restaurants in the area, but it only displays about 20... what's up with that?! Upon further investigation, turns out it only likes to display restaurants on the side of the freeway that you're travelling on! Being a computer engineer, yes, I turned around to test this theory and it was correct. Too funny.

There's some other issues, but I'm tired of typing. I think a little more thought and testing could've been put into this system...

If anyone has updates or knows how to fix these problems, please... drop me an email!

Thanks,
Tony

 

The MyGIG in mine was only 20GB and with all of my music loaded I've used less than 4GB, so having the system take up 10GB isn't a problem for me.

The only thing I could suggest on the long playlist and taking a long time to get to music at the end is to split up one huge playlist into several. Something such as "Eagles Favorite Hits 1", "Eagles Favorite Hits 2", etc.

Also, I believe the POI listing is limited if you try using it while in motion, which might explain some of the listings not showing up. I've never encountered that problem but I do have an aftermarket device installed that can fool the MyGIG into thinking that I'm not moving in order to do things that I normally could not do while driving.

 

I have looked through the forum here to see if anyone has referenced my problem, but I haven't seen much answering the question, so here goes:

I bought a used 08' Avenger, and it came with the MyGIG radio (no Uconnect, no NAV), and I have recently started playing with the importing feature. One thing I noticed is that Grace Notes will show the track information when I put in a CD, but when I go to import the CD to my hard drive, all info is lost, and the play list has the title of the date and time when the CD was ripped!?!? I have found the feature where I can rename the play list, but further than that I cannot rename anything. When I finally resorted to reading the manual, it IMPLIES that the names should be saved . . . however it does not directly state this!!

Does anyone know how to rename the individual file, or get the files to import with the file info attached??

Also an odd note, the manual states that the CD should be imported as a *.WMA file, however every CD I have ripped is listed as a *.aac file!! seems just strange to me -- any help is greatly appreciated!!

 

I was initially frustrated when I used to rip a CD directly to the MyGIG and it wouldn't list all of the song info. Even when I updated to the latest Gracenotes I still had many songs listed by just a track number.

I found a way that works for me. I downloaded iTunes (free d/l from Apple - you don't have to own an iPod) and I use it to rip CDs first to my HDD on my computer. I then use a thumb drive to transfer music over to the MyGIG.

My PC HDD has a special section for MyGIG that is a mirror image of all music on the MyGIG. It is very easy to edit, delete, rename, etc., anything that way before copying it over to the MyGIG. You can copy multiple folders to the thumb drive and then to MyGIG but they must all be on the root directory (no sub folders of other folders). Playlists are easy to name. The name of the folder the music files are in becomes the name of a new playlist when you transfer it to your MyGIG.

Ripping music to the computer first is much faster than doing it directly to MyGIG, at least for me. I use a 4 GB thumb drive, although larger ones may work.

If you want to try updating your Gracenotes database instead of doing the above you can d/l the latest release from here:

Unofficial MyGIG Information Site

You can also d/l the latest MyGIG application software from them, although that will not help with your music track information issue. Be sure and get the right one for your MyGIG. There is a difference between the MyGIG with nav and the MyGIG without. It doesn't matter with the Gracenotes database.

 

what if the songs are not tagged ie unknown and not in a play list