I'm having a very bad initial experience with the iPod Integration kit which Chrysler released this year. Trying or seeing one before I had mine installed was tough, as no dealers I called had much or any experience with them. I took the gamble and I think I may be regretting it.

I was disappointed to see that as soon as you plug in the iPod, your iPod screen and controls are disabled, as all control and display goes to the factory deck. The 8 character display on the deck sucks for viewing song titles, artists, albums, etc., but that was the least of my problems.

I am having 2 major issues and I am interested to know if anyone else is experiencing similar things or not.

Three times in less than one week, the iPod interface to my stereo has disappeared. It usually happens when I'm scanning through artists, playlists, etc. When this happens, I can no longer select the iPod sound source from my deck. The mode button goes back to just selecting AM, FM, or CD changer. The only fix I have found is to disconnect the car battery. It seems to reset everything and get it working again.

The other issue has to do with scanning artist name to select what you want to hear. When you hit button #2 on the radio, it brings up the list of artists which you can scan one at a time using the seek/scan button or one letter of the alphabet at a time using the FF/Rew buttons. This is actually quite an efficient method. You can hit FF twice to skip from A to B to C, then use seek.scan to take you through yoru C artists until you reach Counting Crowes. The only problem is, the alphabet goes A,B, L, M, N, O, P...It entirely skips C through K. The album search works the same way, but it goes through the entire alphabet normally. This bug really sucks if you want to get to something in G or H when you have about 10,000 songs on your iPod like I do. I tried cutting my iPod libarary back to 1,000, but all the same problems exist.

I have an appointment book in 2 weeks to get it swapped for a new unit. I'll post my results then.

Any help or info would be appreciated.

 

Mine cut out once like you said and I just unplugged the actualy ipod module unit and then plugged it back in again and it fixed it. Hasn't happend again (3 months). I don't have any of the strange scanning problems you are having but maybe mine is a different model? I am using it with the RB1 navigation unit and I can see pretty much all of the info I need, song, artist, title, etc. I am having a strange intermitant problem where the display seems to be get "behind" by 1. For example, you're scrolling through artists and it shows that you've selected artist B, but if you choose it, it will show artist A. This phenom is common throughout everything when this happens. Like, all the previous songs info is displayed, even the shuffle status is the opposite, i.e. on when it's off. The ONLY solution for this is to turn the car off and then on. This happens about once every 10 times I turn the car on and according to some insiders, its a bug and not something to do with my specific unit. I get the impression this unit was pushed onto the shelves a bit too early.

I should note that I am using the built-in mulitplexer that allows you to plug a sirius unit into it as well so that you can have both a sirius and an ipod unit. This works well but when the problems I speak of above happen, they carry over to the sirius unit as well. So, it seems that the problem may be in the built-in mux rather than the ipod specific feature.

However, for me it is good enough that I'm keeping my unit(until a new version comes out).

-Kevin

 

Thanks for your input. I'm glad to know I'm not the only one who owns this unit and has seen some issues. I've done a little more investigation into my problems and worked some of them out, so here is an update.

The problems I experienced with skipping letters of the alphabet when sorting artists was not the iPod kits fault entirely. I was using software other than iTunes to load my iPod (JR Media Center). It was changing the sort order of the artists (ignoring la, le, los, etc.). That seemed to be confusing the Chysler iPod kit. When I remove those headers from the artist names, it worked fine. Alternately when I loaded the iPod via iTunes I didn't see this problem.

That fixes one problem, but there are still others which are frustrating me:

1. The Chrysler integration kit is not highly stable. I see a fair bit of erratic behaviour (skipping music when I start it up, controls freezing up, unable to select the iPod input n the stereo). If I just leave it in the car and never touch the iPod controls it is fairly stable, but if I keep taking it in and out it seems to act up more often.

2. When you start the car, the iPod kit loads your song data from the iPod. You can not select a new playlist, artist, album, etc. until that load is complete. Until that time you can only skip forward and back songs which were already playing. For my 60 GB iPod which is loaded with about 10,000 songs, that load takes just over 7 minutes. Way too long if you ask me. That's 7 minutes of listening to my wife's last playlist before I can select one of mine. It's even more frustrating when you make a stop for gas 5 mintues into your drive, so the load starts from scratch when you re-start the car. The only way around this is to disconnect the iPod, select your playlist via the click wheel, and plug it back in. Although it works, that approach seems to add to the instability (see point #1).

I'd love to hear from anyone else who has the Chrysler/Dodge integration kit to see if you have similar experiences or work arounds. I'm taking my car to the dealer next week to get mine replaced. I'm hoping that some of my stability problems might be fixed my a new unit. I'm also going to ask that they install a power switch for the iPod kit. Right now when it gets "confused" I have to pull my main battery connection to reset it - not an ideal fix.

 

Well I got a new unit installed at the dealer and I am seeing all of the same problems I had with the first one.

The power switch to cut power to the iPod connection kit seems to reset things effectively and more easily than popping the battery connection, so I'm pleased with that.

In the end I would have been better off buying an after market deck with an iPod connection. This Chrysler kit is just not ready for prime time and the dealers don;t seem to know anything about it.

 

I've seen odd problems like that also, unplugging the iPod and plugging it back in resolves it.

The "get behind by one track" problem also hits me every once and a while, if you stay with it it will catch up - weird.

Can any of you display Artist/Title info on Sirius as well as the iPod? I have the RB1 and everything works fine in iPod mode but I have nothing other than station number on Sirius. I've seen screenshots of the RB1 displaying Sirius info without an iPod attached - can the system handle both? Are there any special cables needed? I have the multiplexer but that does nothing.

Thanks,

Joe

 

Sorry..I can't help you on the Sirius problem. I don't have that for my radio.