digitalfx,
I can't thank you enough for your post concerning your experiences, likes/dislikes.
When you were playing a song, did the radio display the artist, song, album, etc? Did it scroll or did it function as the RDS does for the radio?
Mike
Overall I am very pleased with the unit....but there are several things that could be improved.
First, tech support is weak at best. I called several times and the only response I got was "thats the way it was designed" when I offered suggestions for improvement, it was like they had no idea what I was talking about.
In order to play songs from the Ipod, you must create playlists. The playlist cannot contain more than 99 songs. The VAIS will not play music unless it is a playlist. The problem this presents is that it limits the way you access your music....for example if you want to listen to a specific artist.
The work around I am currently using- I created a playlist for each artist and placed all the songs for that artist inside. This works ok except scrolling thru dozens of artists on the Lexus radio is a royal pain.
The "feature" that I have the biggest problem with is the way they implement the Random mode and Disc Random mode...these do not work well. Specifically Disc Random, this mode only randomly selects albums inside the current playlist. Since I created numerous playlist by artist name I would like to see Disc Random mode pull from all the available playlists. NOTE: a playlist on the ipod is treated like a DISC. You scroll thru the various playlists using the DISC up/down buttons. Therefore it is natural for DISC RANDOM to randomly select songs from the various playlists...this is NOT the case. I have talked w/ tech support about this several times and offered suggestions, but each time I was told:
"Thats the way it was designed"
I noticed today that when I receive a bluetooth phone call the radio display blanks out as the radio is paused. The phone conversation is now over the radio speakers. When I disconnect the phone call and the Ipod starts playing again, the display now says "NO TITLE" . I have to cycle thru all the radio inputs to get the display back.
One other issue which was reported earlier in this Forum- You have to cycle thru the inputs twice to get to the CD1 (Ipod) input. For me this is not a big issue as I use the Ipod 99 percent of the time....although it should be addressed in an update.
Again, overall I am pleased. Install was simply, sound quality is good and it interfaces well with the Lexus radio.