tickerguy

Yeah, it comes up pretty fast on the 4000 -- long before the unit has booted.  Then it glitches and reappears once the boot has completed.  Maybe 1-2 seconds from power-on?

Yep.

I have one for my 4000 and it works fine.

It can definitely be changed IF YOU KNOW THE CURRENT password.

If you don't, of course....

Sort your USB stick's directory in track order and play in file mode.

Planned obsolescence is the way of the world these days.  I've caught various manufacturers doing specifically crappy things in this regard such as soldering in CMOS batteries onto a PCB in such a way that you can't get them out for replacement without risking destroying the PCB -- even with a proper SMT hot-air rework station (the high thermal mass of the battery makes this an extremely tricky operation.) Then there are all the newer cellphones with non field-replaceable PRIMARY batteries -- a lithium cell that has a known cycle life of approximately 500, which pretty-much guarantees that in two years you are buying a new phone.

Never mind the explodo-chinese-electrolytic cap issues with LCD monitors on the power boards which typically fail about a year and a half in for those who use their computers on a "workday" basis.  Those I can easily fix and have several times for both myself and friends; $5 worth of caps instead of a new $200+ monitor.

This contrasts with the old Pioneer receiver, also full of electrolytic caps, that currently runs my PC speakers.  It's nearing being of legal drinking age and works just fine, or my KEF 104/2s that I just rebuilt -- and the crossovers, including the caps on them, have no problems at all.

Bits are bits if you're feeding the head unit a bitstream.  A lossless bitstream that the head unit supports (e.g. FLAC) is even better.  Whether that bitstream comes off a SD card or something on the USB connector does not matter so long as the data comes off at the rate required to feed the DAC in the head unit.

If you're feeding it analog (via the phone's DAC) then you're at the phone DAC's mercy plus the front-end noise in the head unit.  While the latter shouldn't be material the DAC quality is often questionable at best, and what's worse is that you're probably feeding the head unit "headphone out" rather than line out so you're not only getting the DAC quality in the phone you're also getting the phone's headphone amp quality (or lack thereof) before the car head unit gets ahold of it.

Note that Bluetooth streaming is also a problem as the Pioneer head units do not support aptX, which is of very good quality.  The standard AD2P codec is only so-so; it beats two stages of analog (your phone's DAC and then headphone amp) most of the time but that's not saying a lot.

Other than the SD cards that require exFAT (which the NEX units cannot read).....

I have no problem with the SSD in FILE mode, but I organized the directories in a logical way, and sorted them on the disk (which requires using a FAT format instead of NTFS.)

Works fine.

Pioneer still ought to pull the head out of their backside, considering that the base Android OS under this thing has a sort routine in it, and even if it didn't writing a quicksort (or hell, even a bubble sort!) is one of those "first semester" programming problems.

Hmm is that why my NEX doesn't recognize track numbers on my FLAC files? In Tag mode, it only lists the songs alphabetically, not by the number in the file tag.

Pioneer has a terminal case of stupids across the board in this regard.

In "tag" mode it will not sort on track number PERIOD, which is idiotic if you drill to the album level.  You're not looking for an individual song, you're looking for an ALBUM.  To ignore the context is dumb.

What's dumber is that when in FILE mode it won't sort directories, so if you organize your disk as "Artist->Album->Songs" (which is logical) it will happily present both the Artist and Album lists without sorting them, but it does sort the "Song" (terminal) level of the structure, and as such will honor a numeric tag for the song title such as "01 SomeSong.xxx"

The idiocy of the people who programmed this thing continues to amaze me; with two updates to the firmware thus far you'd think they would have fixed this (and yes, I have reported it.)  Then again the other manufacturers out there do this wrong too; it appears that stupidity is contagious in this industry.

Pj, 120gb and I've had it for several years -- it's an older drive, but has reasonably-recent firmware on it.

Were I buying one now I'd pick any of the decent consumer SSDs in a size appropriate to your needs.  Note that there remains a directory sorting issue (specifically, these head units do not sort directories on external storage, which is terminally stupid -- but it is what it is) so formatting it as NTFS is problematic; you can "sort" a FAT directory device using various third party tools, but NOT an NTFS one.

I am running an older OCZ Vertex II and it works fine.  Any of the consumer models should be fine; you do NOT want an "enterprise" model as those tend to have materially higher power consumption and may require external power instead of being able to take it directly from the USB port, and that will lead to instability.

There's also no reason to pay the (much) higher price the enterprise models come with; as the drive is not being written to power loss protection (which is the big difference with enterprise SSDs, along with more spare sectors) isn't worth anything in this application.

Update to 1.08.  1.06 will EVENTUALLY do so if you drive long enough, but it requires HOURS (literally) of drive-time with a large volume before it finishes whatever crap it is doing in the background, and until then it will NOT resume.

Yep -- the NEX units will not look in the folder for artwork files (which is stupid and wasteful); to display the artwork must be in EACH music file individually as a tag. Yes, this means if you have 20 songs in an album you must consume 20x the album art in disk space, but since music is rather large compared against these art files it's not as bad as it initially sounds.

These head units do not like album art that is over 600px in either dimension -- mine never did, even with original factory firmware.

No problems here.

600x600 is the maximum and the album art must be embedded in each file; the head unit will NOT read it from the folder.

I detest liars.

Pioneer claimed there was "no problem able to be reproduced" with the resume not working for up to a full driving DAY with 1.06 on a large external USB device (e.g. SSD full of media.)  Well, they obviously reproduced something and fixed it, because 1.08 takes about 5 minutes to read my 120GB SSD on the first boot, doesn't play anything until it has finished, but once it does finish it picks up exactly where it left off immediately and thereafter.

In other words, the "no problem found" was a lie -- they not only found the problem I reamed them on they fixed it.

I'm happy it's fixed.  

I'm more than somewhat pissed that they didn't own up to breaking it in the first place.

PS: Sort order on tag lookup is still broken at the song (after drilling to an album) level, and is probably broken at the file level (if your disk directory itself is not sorted.)

It most-certainly does work on vehicles with DRL.

The illumination lead controls it generally; perhaps your installer didn't hook it up thinking the CANBus had the data on it, and the iDatalink unit doesn't pass it (or the unit doesn't decode that?)

I have DRL and the illumination wire connected and it works fine on my unit.

It's not "a little more time", it was a literal all-day drive in the car on the back of a previous day in which I was in the vehicle for a couple of hours, and during which it did not clear.

This implies (rather strongly!) that if I remove the drive to add media to it then in "ordinary use" it will effectively never clear, as it's not all that common that I take all day, 700+ mile road trips -- and yet it was not until I did take one that the problem went away.

The 4000NEX most-certainly does have the problem!  That's what I own.

It cleared itself -- but again, it was after roughly 10 hours in the car, with a few breaks for fuel and the can, music playing off the SSD the entire time.

Yeah, right -- stick a few files on a USB stick and it finishes quickly.

Now go grab a big stick or a SSD, plug it in full of media, and tell me what happens.

Correct -- the unit said "Format Read 100%" for a literal dozen hours straight of playing time on the top level music page (which is new; it previously would not start playing until it was done) yet would not resume.

So yeah, it was doing some sort of indexing, but (1) on f/w 1.02 it used to finish indexing on the same disk of the same size in ~20 minutes or so from a "new" format and startup, and from then on was fast (~20 seconds from a cold start), having recognized that it had the same drive connected and (2) now, in 1.06, it requires hours, like more than 10 of them, to do the same thing and gives no status on where it is during that time, having claimed for nearly all of it to have finished since it is showing 100% complete.

While my SSD is large it's not that large -- 70Gb in use, most of it being FLAC files (which are huge compared to MP3s)

My unit finally (after more than 12 hours of road time playing music!) started resuming where it was on its own.

There was and is no visible indication of a difference or what it was doing all that time.

And no, that's not acceptable as I dread any attempt to update the content on that drive as it may do the same thing again!  I suspect if I hadn't gone on a literal road trip with several hours of uninterrupted play it would have NEVER finished whatever it was doing.

No, it goes all the way to 100% on my SSD; it shows the percentage read now on the screen at the top level of the tag/folder display.

When it first loaded it showed the directories but some were grayed out, as it scanned they "lit up" and all became accessible.  This IS different behavior; on the original firmware it would display "Format Read" with the percentage and until it was done you couldn't do anything at all.

It's POSSIBLE the unit is doing something internally and this will "magically start working" but I've taken two 20 minute drives with it playing after it finished indexing everything and the read percentage having long reached 100% and it still didn't properly resume.

I called as well -- there is no way to revert to the previous software and they have no timeline on a fix, or even a promise of a fix.