Derek87

the only times i have had connection issues were

...when it refuses to disconnect from another wifi network. this happened both at our house and at my in-laws. after forcing it to choose the wifi network for the 4500NEX a couple of times, the iPhone seemed to learn that i preferred the 4500NEX over the others. its a shame Apple removed the previous ability (in ios11, i think) to prioritize the list of known networks manually.

i did this while stationary and haven't had a problem since in my few months of ownership.

the only other problem i had which was random was 2 hours into a road trip, CarPlay disconnected and i couldn't reconnect it until i powered off the car. my phone showed the wifi network for the 4500nex was still connected, so it was certainly a bug/problem with the 4500 itself.

can't help you much from the Android Auto perspective, but what little i know about Apple CarPlay, it needs wifi on to work. bluetooth doesn't have the bandwidth to transfer the data wirelessly. (i have a 4500 using CarPlay)

i was able to format at SDXC card (micro in an SD adapter) using the NTFS file system (a trick for this mac guy but easy if yo are running Windows) and my Pioneer 4500NEX recognizes it fine. i have just over 10,000 tracks using up 249gb of the space.  i couldn't get FAT32 to work (that would have made things easier on the Mac side of things)

let me know if you have any questions. i don't know if it will work with older NEX units, but i believe it works on the 4400,8400,4500,8500 based on my limited research. 

i just recently installed a 4500NEX in my car and i am loving it. one thing that attracted me to this unit was the SD card slot which held the promise of being able to buy a large SD card to put a large portion of my music library on it in lossless (FLAC) format.

i wanted to share my experiences as it might help other trying to do something similar...

 i had read about many people reporting about some limitations of using the TAG mode where the albums would playback/be listed in alphabetical order. i read many explanations for why this was the case, and solutions. in the end, renaming the files, changing the track numbers to a three digit format, and paying attention to the "writing order" of transferring the files to the SD card did not resolve the issue. the thing that worked for me was to use MP3tag (thankfully runs with WINE on a Mac, as long as one isn't running the latest Catalina OS) and change all of the Song Titles to have a prefix of a two digit track number. it works exactly as i would hope and i can how access my music using Artist or Album and the albums will play back in the proper song order. the only downside i see of this approach is that if one wants to search by "Song", the alphabetical shortcut on the RHS of the screen won't work because all of the song titles now start with a two digit number. for me, that's not a big deal because my goal was to be able to play back the songs by Album.

with this SD card, i then freed up space on my iPod touch (3rd gen, 64gb) to hold my playlists with ALAC format (lossless), so now i have a great music library in my car, all at the source resolution.

it would have been nice if the Pioneer deck didn't have what i consider is a bug/oversight, but at least this kludge works for my uses.

other small tidbit/question:

- has anyone been able to format a large capacity card in FAT32 format? (for cards greater than 32gb) i ended up having to use NTFS (which requires some extra work for this Mac guy).

*there is a related issue if you hook up a newer iPhone or iPod (5th generation touch or newer) and try to read the music as an iPod (i.e., not using carplay): what happens is the Playlists get messed up and will only playback in alphabetical order. Pioneer tech support confirmed this for me. :\

On 10/21/2019 at 8:36 AM, donbrown said:

Well ended up buying the 8500 new for $679 US

awesome! what are you installing it in? 

i recently installed a 4500 and love it. was tempted by the 8500, but couldn't justify the extra $200 for the nav because the resistive screen on the 4500 was plenty responsive to me.