Hi,

Just wondering if you guys know if Pioneer is working on a new version of the CD-iB100II . I've been trying to get something for my ipod but i only heard 2 starts reviews about the interface being slow. I also looked at the cable whithout the interface, but i assimed you can't use the Avic interface with just the cable adapter, right?

Oh, i forgot to say, i owened an Avic-z1 upgraded to a Z3.

Any help or feedback will be great.

Thanks a lot,

Zeek

Its slow, but if you want to control everything from the screen, you have no other choice

It IS slow, and if you have a big library it will take you several minutes to find the song or album you want. 5 minutes doesn't sound like a lot, but it's torture when you're driving along trying to find a song.

However, with your own custom playlists (favorite songs, favorite albums, genres, etc.), learning to enjoy the shuffle feature, and patience, it can be just fine. I've got songs in playlists for favorites by genre, decades, and some smart lists for my favorites bands. Most of the time it serves me just fine. The only time I get frustrated is when my 15-year-old requests a specific song and want to find it. LOL

It's unfortunately, but Alpine really has the better iPod connector. However, I don't regret installing the Z2 one bit. You just have to accept and work your way around it's iPod limitations.

No what you really need to do is bitch at Pioneer until they fix the issue. I dislike Apple products and don't own an iPod but I really feel like this is something they need to fix ASAP. It's bull.

Is it really something they can fix? The Z series is 3 year old hardware. The newer Pioneers with better ipod interfaces use completely different ipod cables that don't go through the P-bus so I would think its a limitation of the P-bus

Yes, this is something they can fix.

My AVH-P6800DVD uses the same iPod interface box over IP-BUS and so did the DEH-P680MP that used to be in my wife's car. Screen updates are slow, but they could scroll through the list about as fast as you can press the button (or turn the knob on the 680MP). On my 6800DVD I can press page down 10-times in rapid succession and after the 2-seconds it takes for the screen to refresh, it would have paged down 10-times. The Z-series has to wait for a complete screen refresh every time the button is pressed. It's a caching problem (or lack thereof). If they wanted to, they could even make the scroll bar active to where you touch the middle of it and it goes right to the middle of the list.

The machine runs Windows CE, so yes, it could be done, easily.

Too bad this thing isn't open-source.

I just installed my z3 to replace my recently stolen Kenwood DNX7100. It's a great head unit, but the scrolling function is driving me crazy -- going up/down one page at a time, and no touch-sensitive scroll bar, which the Kenwood actually had. There's got to be a way around this by now. Any hacks or suggestions?

There is a way around it, it's called buy a new HU!

There isn't a real big following for hacking the Z-series. I think mainly because it's so difficult to hack. Windows Automotive is really stripped down, there's no Explorer.exe so no way to run 3rd party apps. We can't install the necessary files to run full Windows CE without Platform Builder 4.2, which nobody seems to have. Lastly, any binaries would have to be custom-compiled because most CE devices use ARM processors while the Z-series uses an SH4 processor.

I know Pioneer isn't going to do anything about this, and I highly doubt any hackers will bother either, so new HU is the only solution.

That sux! I guess I'll just have to live with it. At least if voice command could control the track search like you can in the music library source, it would be a way around. I don't know what pioneer was thinking making voice command control almost everything except the ipod source.

I could start making some playlists I guess. I haven't really made any yet since I usually prefer to scroll through or shuffle the entire song list, but it looks like that's the only option to easily access my favorite tunes.

Thanks for the confirmation -- it'll help me rest a little easier now.

Yeah, sorry for the bad news.

I'd love to be able to hack the thing, but Platform Builder itself is a pay app from Microsoft and it's quite expensive (not sure the cost, but it's typically purchased by large companies for use enterprise-wide). However, if we had that, it shouldn't be that difficult to turn Windows Automotive into full Windows CE. If we could do that, it would even be possible to run 3rd party apps on the Z-series. With PB installed, you can use Microsoft Visual Studio to write and compile apps for all CE compatible processors, including the SH4 used in the Z-series. I got a PM from a guy on the XDA-developers.com forums once saying he had a friend that had Platform Builder and to email the guy, but when I did, the guy didn't want to send me a copy so that never went anywhere.

At one time I downloaded IDA Pro which lets you disassemble CE applications into assembly language code, but I'm not brainy enough to where assembly language makes any sense whatsoever. I couldn't even figure out how to do something simple like bypass the navigation warning. If only I were as smart as those Russian hackers that write computer viruses.

I took a few hacking classes at school; that's a good idea you had there to disassemble the software... I bet if I gave it a try I could patch the warning message

Please do try it. At one point I tried replacing any reference to the "safety_caution" function with NOP's, but best I could get is it would lock up when I press the MAP button! Either that or it would work, but still show the safety warning.

Well, at least there doesn't seem to be any kind of checksum so you can mod the code all you want.