ChrisKemper

I found the culprit - the initial voltage available to the car UPON startup impacts the level of BT noise of this headunit for the entire time the car is on. 

My battery (Duramax Gold) is 3 years old and only retains 12.09v.

Swapping to a new battery which retains 12.65v and the bluetooth noise is immediately gone

Swapping to the 3 year old battery and it immediately returns 

Refreshed the 3 year old battery - it now retains 12.59v and the bluethooth noise is immediately gone

How i refreshed the battery: 

• removed plastic cell covers
• slowly poured baking soda into each cell to neutralize the acid, left overnight, poured out
• mixed 1 part epsom salt to 3 parts distilled water
• poured into cells to correct height, capped, shook
• took to mechanic and had them toss it on a 3phase charger overnight ($10)

Howdy folks, my NEX4200’s Bluetooth has grown increasingly noisy over the last few weeks after nearly 2 years of using Bluethooth for the majority of listening.

Even when all pairings have been deleted when Bluethooth is selected as a source the white noise pushed to the amplifiers is deafening.

This occurs, even when in the middle of the country (away from most signal sources), with no other electronics in the car, and with the car turned off (battery only) – with all accessories disabled.

This even occurs when turning off the amps and hooking up speakers directly to the head unit.

It occurs with different devices when paired and when nothing is paired– and is immediate when the key turns on power.

Once the pairing syncs and music begins the horridly loud noise continues. 

Selecting any source other than Bluethooth and the headunit functions as expected.

Does anyone know of an aftermarket Bluethooth module that is compatible with this unit or of a way to fix this most irksome issue?

Best

The file list is not in perfect Alphabetical order.  For example, Amanda Palmer is listed after Element 101 but before Ellie Goulding.  -->   I REALLY wish I could figure out how to overcome this problem

The short -> Great Unit Marred by a Substandard File Browser

When loading a Fresh Media card, SD or USD (Only change the USB when the car is powered down), you MUST wait for the entire collection to read before powering down the head-unit.  A fresh card refers to not only the first insertion, but also if you remove the card to add new music.  IF you power down the head unit before this, you will need to factory reset the unit …. for it to again read past 90% on larger music collections and a tendency to freeze playback on some powerups requiring a restart of the vehicle.   

The file browser will quickly load to show all the artists you have, greyed out.  You will NOT be able to select these artists for play until the ID3v2.3 tags have been read in and the selection becomes white.

You must use ID3v2.3 tags and REMOVE all other tags. 

While we are at it, you should ONLY have music files (mp3, flac, etc) in your folders.  JPG, DB, INI, etc files will cause SIGNIFICANTLY longer initial load times.

99 GB worth of MP3s (about 400 artists worth) takes nearly an hour to load once clean.  Each repower takes about 5 minutes to re-read the SD card, assuming the card has NOT been removed.  It takes about 15 seconds to resume playing.  

Fully load your SD source before shutting down the car to load your USB1 source.

Sadly, when you click on the file explorer it takes you to the top of the folder.  This means if you are on Artist Queen and you want to play Queensryche you will need to scroll down from your ‘A’ artists.   

The file list is not in perfect Alphabetical order.  For example, Amanda Palmer is listed after Element 101 but before Ellie Goulding. 

The Long ->The Story of how use SD/USB stored Music & Album Art

I use the Pioneer AVH4200-NEX unit to play primarily from 2 sources -> a USB thumbdrive in the top slot that contains up to 3 audiobooks at a time (frequently updated) and a SD card that contains my entire music collection (seldom updated).  Both drives are formatted as NTFS - SanDisk Ultra 200GB Class 10 Micro SDXC & SanDisk Ultra Fit 64GB USB 3.0.

The SD card stores the music in the following structure: Category/Artist/Album/*.mp3. 

I only have 4 categories: Children, Music, Musical, & Soundtrack

Upon receiving the unit I noticed that a great deal of the Music library was poorly tagged  due to using different tagging methods over 15+ years of turning my crawl spaced stored CDs into 320kbps MP3s.  After messing around with a few different solutions BlissHQ was used to have proper ID3v2.3 tags with embedded art.  All other tags, including APE have been removed. 

Prior to the upgrading the firmware from v1.01 to v1.03 I could resume playing SD Music or USB Audiobook within 10-15 seconds of starting the car.  If I were to add a fresh song to the SD card, it would take about 20 minutes to re-populate/read for full playback access, however I could play most pre-existing songs off of the SD card or listen to a USB stored Audiobook while this occurred.  The only issue was a few greyed out file folders and some of the Artists would be listed out of alphabetical order -> it is this issue that prompted me to try the latest and greatest firmware.  

With no changes to any of the files on the USB or SD card, after the firmware update the SD car would not read past 90% and every time I restart the radio it begins reading from 40-60%.  MANY of the artists would no longer populate and would often be unable to play either USB or SD without a vehicle restart.  The ONLY action I took for this to happen was to remove the SD and USB drives so that I could install the v1.03 firmware.

After talking to Pioneer it appears the unit has no way to roll back to the prior firmware and they suggested that I do a factory restore -> it keeps v1.03 but allows the settings to go all back to default.  Note that Five Star Stereo has found has suggested that 1.01 CAN be flashed over 1.03 IF one can only find the files.  With no changes to the unit, and only the SD card inserted, the problem persisted.

So, it was time to try something else. 

Note: Do the following at your own risk

Using a Windows Machine

1  - Copy the music to a local HDD.  I put it into a folder named TempMusic

2 -  Format the SD card, unselect Quick Format, and give the card a new name

3 – Strip the TempMusic of everything other than MP3 files, post Tag Cleanup, all album art should be imbedded anyways

4 – Right click TempMusic and ensure that ReadAccess is disabled for the folder and all subfolders

5 – Create and run (NOT as an Administrator) CleanForPioneer.bat file in TempMusic with the content below.  Note that this deletes all files with the extensions listed in all subfolders from TempMusic.  /A:H then removes any previously deleted/hidden files.  

cd %1

attrib -h -s *.* /s

del /s *.ini

del /s *.db

del /s *.m3u

del /s *.jpg

del /s *.png

del * /A:H

6 – Now ensure only MP3 files remain. 

Open CMD and CD to TempMusic

dir /s/b >f.csv [enter]

This returns a list of all directories and files. 

Open this in Notepad and replace all “,†with “ “. 

Open this in excel

Column B: =RIGHT(TRIM(A1),4)

Column C: =IF(LEFT(B1,1)=".",0,1)

Filter by C  = 0

Sort by B.  This will return a list of all 3 character long file extensions.  Remove anything that is not an MP3.

7 – Now run CleanForPioneer.bat again