Droid RAZR ICS 4.04 setup with Alpine CDE-HD137BT Car Stereo

[Droid_Ritch]

...Hey guys I know this is a bit off topic for a post being that I am talking about a car stereo setup. I just recently invested in a new car stereo receiver. This is my first time having a nice stereo that has bluetooth phone, bluetooth pandora, HD FM/AM, iPhone/iPod, USB, and Auxiliary capabilities..as well as being sirius xm ready...I understand that the phone has to be paired with the stereo to use the bluetooth phone feature as well as the pandora feature. What I am interested in doing is figuring out how the USB audio is supposed to work..I have the the phone plugged into the stereo..The phone is set to the (Media Device) setting...The stereo is set to the (USB Audio) setting...but yet my stereo is still reading "FILE NOT FOUND" I am confused whether this would be a setting problem on the Phone or the Stereo...My goal is to be able to play my MP3s stored within the SD card memory of my Droid RAZR ICS 4.04. My stereo is an Alpine CDE-HD137BT. If anyone has any knowledge on this I'd definitely appreciate the help. Thanks guys.

 

[zerogravity]

Try setting your phone to USB Mass Storage mode and the USB icon is in the notification bar. It will take a few seconds to read the music files on the phone. Also, due to SOME head unit limitations (not sure about yours), you can only have 255 music files per folder. Any more than that and you will not be able to play all your music.


I have a Kenwood with the same features. here is how I have it set up:
All my music, MP3, Pandora, ect., plays through Bluetooth on my stero. I have my source location on my stereo set to Bluetooth Audio. As soon as I push play on the phone, or open Pandora, it streams the audio. This way I stream straight through to the head unit. I have my ipod attached to the ipod cable (and never use it anymore thanks to pandora). I have nothing attached to the USB connection, its routed to the glove box, same with the ipod. When I use GPS on the phone, it turns down the music, speaks the direction/ turn info, and resumes as normal. I just plug it up to the car charger to keep battery drain down. Let mw know if this works for you.

 

[Droid_Ritch]

Try setting your phone to USB Mass Storage mode and the USB icon is in the notification bar. It will take a few seconds to read the music files on the phone. Also, due to SOME head unit limitations (not sure about yours), you can only have 255 music files per folder. Any more than that and you will not be able to play all your music.


I have a Kenwood with the same features. here is how I have it set up:
All my music, MP3, Pandora, ect., plays through Bluetooth on my stero. I have my source location on my stereo set to Bluetooth Audio. As soon as I push play on the phone, or open Pandora, it streams the audio. This way I stream straight through to the head unit. I have my ipod attached to the ipod cable (and never use it anymore thanks to pandora). I have nothing attached to the USB connection, its routed to the glove box, same with the ipod. When I use GPS on the phone, it turns down the music, speaks the direction/ turn info, and resumes as normal. I just plug it up to the car charger to keep battery drain down. Let mw know if this works for you.

I appreciate the help and suggestions...

I messed around with it for quite a while and this is what I came up with...When having my stereo set to "USB Audio" and having my Droid RAZR set to "USB Mass Storage" with "USB Debugging" on...This appears to be the only way I am able to play music from my phone when trying to listen to music strictly through USB...I'm also able to actually control the selection of audio files straight from the stereo and it even shows media info...On the contrary, when using the USB to listen to music...I am only able to listen to audio files stored in the internal memory of the phone...external memory on the mounted sd card just will not read for whatever reason...So this is a bit confusing and temperamental but I found my way around with it..There's also of course the benefit that the phone will always be charging when plugged into the USB.

When using the bluetooth features...the phone answering and calling features of the stereo work great...The bluetooth pandora feature works great as well because I'm able to control and choose stations right from the stereo....But as far as listening to music stored on my phone using bluetooth...it works great and sounds great and displays media info from both internal and external memory...but I am not able to control and choose files from the stereo...Overall it does have the convenience of being wireless.

So it appears that there are PROS and CONS to using both "USB mode" or "Bluetooth mode"...as far as "Auxiliary mode"...well that's a different story...haha...I don't have an auxiliary cord at the moment so I wasn't able to try that yet...I tried to explain all of this the best I could to not sound confusing...but as complicated as it all might sound...I would still always choose an Android rather than the "cookie-cutter, simple, small, everyone needs to have, overrated iPhone. haha

 

[lyrictenor1]

Interesting, I have the same model stereo, and everything works well except for the Pandora feature. I have to play it through the stereo's "BT Audio" setting and not the "Pandora" setting, as it just displays "No Pandora" when I select that setting.

Also, like you, I'm not able to select songs while in BT Audio, but I can (sometimes) use the track forward and track backwards buttons to change tracks.

 

[fd2blk]

Ok here is what I have found that may or may not helps some of you. I have the RAZR MAXX and had ICS 4.04 and the radio was pretty much useless for Media BT. I manually upgraded to Jellybean 4.1.2 today and it has fixed 80% of the problems. I now can stream Pandora and Tune in Radio over BT without a problem and make voice command phone calls and it returns to BT audio. Not much luck with the Pandora selection it won't launch Pandora or even find the phone most of the time. I have seen a few glitches when transferring back off phone to BT but it seems to recover quickly and I am able to use my se3lection arows on BT audio to FF through the Pandora songs. Hope this helps and just a little further info I manually updated to JB and have not rooted my phone.