Kia Stinger Navigation Map Update

[Marc Collins]

I have. But they did not care. For me, the single biggest issue is them removing the option for 'Folder' for searching and playing from. Makes no sense, and every other car has it. This one DID have it, and they removed it! Stupidity.

Utter stupidity considering it was the only option that would play USB songs in the proper order from the album instead of (bizarre and useless) alphabetical order!

And where is the reasonable selection of txt auto-replies--again that every other car has had for years. The Stinger options are laughable (and therefore also mostly useless).

 

[Stinger305]

Wait, with the new update you can't scroll through and play USB albums directly from the folder? I am definitely NOT getting that upgrade!

As far as alphabetical order, you should try numbering album songs 1, 2, 3, etc. to enforce/preserve their ordering.

 

[stinger541]

Wait, with the new update you can't scroll through and play USB albums directly from the folder? I am definitely NOT getting that upgrade!

As far as alphabetical order, you should try numbering album songs 1, 2, 3, etc. to enforce/preserve their ordering.

Correct, you lose the ability to use 'Folder' on the left as the way to play. They removed it. Closest is 'File' but that just looks at a root directory. So, say you set it to that but also shuffle. It will now jump all over the place, no longer in that folder.

 

[Marc Collins]

Wait, with the new update you can't scroll through and play USB albums directly from the folder? I am definitely NOT getting that upgrade!

As far as alphabetical order, you should try numbering album songs 1, 2, 3, etc. to enforce/preserve their ordering.

Doesn't work. The songs are numbered and will play in every other music player in proper order, but the Stinger re-orders them to alphabetical order. It's discussed ad nauseum in other threads and probably earlier in this one, too. No one expects a music player (of any kind) to play songs in album order if they are not numbered accordingly.

 

[stinger541]

Doesn't work. The songs are numbered and will play in every other music player in proper order, but the Stinger re-orders them to alphabetical order. It's discussed ad nauseum in other threads and probably earlier in this one, too. No one expects a music player (of any kind) to play songs in album order if they are not numbered accordingly.

You might need to look at the metadata for your songs, the tags. The Stinger for me ignores any of my file names, instead looking at the IDV3 and 4 tags. Not sure what you use, but say you play a song in winamp or windows media player, whatever...there is an option to edit those.

 

[Marc Collins]

Correct, you lose the ability to use 'Folder' on the left as the way to play. They removed it. Closest is 'File' but that just looks at a root directory. So, say you set it to that but also shuffle. It will now jump all over the place, no longer in that folder.

I have been complaining to KIA about the crappy music search/sort/play functionality for a year and a half and their solution is to make the poor thing that was already there even worse. It's truly unbelievable considering none of this is specific to the Stinger. It's plain old boring generic phone and music play functions that are in every car. Unless its because they are completely incompetent, we can assume they must believe everyone will be hard-wire attaching their phones to the car so they can use their Apple or Android music player and therefore the one in the car doesn't matter.

As has also been pointed out ad nauseum, if you live outside the US and have wireless charging and full UVO app (with Google search via the car mirror button), why would you want to have cables jammed into the tiny console area and fiddle with attaching your phone every time you get in the car? I also prefer USB music (and you only have one USB data port) because I can use much larger vastly better quality lossless files and have more songs than I could ever fit on my phone. They gave us this technology, but then prevent us from using it optimally through other poor decisions and design choices.

 

[Marc Collins]

You might need to look at the metadata for your songs, the tags. The Stinger for me ignores any of my file names, instead looking at the IDV3 and 4 tags. Not sure what you use, but say you play a song in winamp or windows media player, whatever...there is an option to edit those.

If they play in order when using "Folder" mode, but not in order when using "Album" or "Artist" mode, the problem is with the software in the car, not my music files. Period. Been discussed to death on here for a long time. Sorry to be abrupt.

 

[Stinger305]

If they play in order when using "Folder" mode, but not in order when using "Album" or "Artist" mode, the problem is with the software in the car, not my music files. Period. Been discussed to death on here for a long time. Sorry to be abrupt.

I haven't seen those discussions so there's a lot I'm missing, but your statement above is simply not true just from a basic programming standpoint.

The "folder" option is just a random list of files in a folder. They could be a bunch of songs from different albums and artists, and will be listed alphabetically by title in almost every operating system. So playing songs through the folder hierarchy relies on filenames.

Albums are not necessarily folders, and their songs and ordering are usually defines by ID3/ID4 metadata tags. It's totally possible for software to be looking for those and not falling back on song titles. So I could see how the two play modes might act differently.

I'll look at my various play modes and report my findings back here in a bit.

 

[Marc Collins]

I haven't seen those discussions so there's a lot I'm missing, but your statement above is simply not true just from a basic programming standpoint.

The "folder" option is just a random list of files in a folder. They could be a bunch of songs from different albums and artists, and will be listed alphabetically by title in almost every operating system. So playing songs through the folder hierarchy relies on filenames.

Albums are not necessarily folders, and their songs and ordering are usually defines by ID3/ID4 metadata tags. It's totally possible for software to be looking for those and not falling back on song titles. So I could see how the two play modes might act differently.

I'll look at my various play modes and report my findings back here in a bit.

It may not be "true" from a programming perspective, but it is how the car/player behaves.

 

[stinger541]

I haven't seen those discussions so there's a lot I'm missing, but your statement above is simply not true just from a basic programming standpoint.

The "folder" option is just a random list of files in a folder. They could be a bunch of songs from different albums and artists, and will be listed alphabetically by title in almost every operating system. So playing songs through the folder hierarchy relies on filenames.

Albums are not necessarily folders, and their songs and ordering are usually defines by ID3/ID4 metadata tags. It's totally possible for software to be looking for those and not falling back on song titles. So I could see how the two play modes might act differently.

I'll look at my various play modes and report my findings back here in a bit.

This is what I was saying...I know that the Stinger plays based on the metadata tags, which was why I was suggesting taking a look at that. I was having a hard time figuring out why it was displaying titles differently from what I knew I named them...turned out it was the tags. Not everyone is aware of metadata and the role it plays. The folder option is just a filing system.

What also drives me nuts is that they gave us only ONE USB port! Not charging, mind you, but actual USB! They also did THAT wrong, not following the USB partitioning standard....which is why you cannot connect a hub up to it.

 

[turboAWD]

This is what I was saying...I know that the Stinger plays based on the metadata tags, which was why I was suggesting taking a look at that. I was having a hard time figuring out why it was displaying titles differently from what I knew I named them...turned out it was the tags. Not everyone is aware of metadata and the role it plays. The folder option is just a filing system.

Yeah, I was also going to look at this. I added tags for some players so it would do it in proper order, but I may have not done the tags fully numbered properly with my little script hack.

Worst case, if it's looking at tags, throw in an additional "A_" for song 01, "B_" for song 02, etc at the beginning for the meta tags. It's not sexy, but it should work.

Edit: looking at one album, it appears it IGNORES the mp3info "track" field. I have my files named 01_<Title>.mp3, but then in metadata, I did:
Title: <Title>
Track: 01
That worked for our '15 Town and Country with Uconnect, IIRC.

I'll have to try with title being 01_<Title> to see if the Stinger likes that better..

 

[Marc Collins]

This is what I was saying...I know that the Stinger plays based on the metadata tags, which was why I was suggesting taking a look at that. I was having a hard time figuring out why it was displaying titles differently from what I knew I named them...turned out it was the tags. Not everyone is aware of metadata and the role it plays. The folder option is just a filing system.

What also drives me nuts is that they gave us only ONE USB port! Not charging, mind you, but actual USB! They also did THAT wrong, not following the USB partitioning standard....which is why you cannot connect a hub up to it.

If the Folder option is/was just a filing system, then why is it the only one that works/worked properly for USB stick-based music? Reverse of your logic...

 

[Marc Collins]

Yeah, I was also going to look at this. I added tags for some players so it would do it in proper order, but I may have not done the tags fully numbered properly with my little script hack.

Worst case, if it's looking at tags, throw in an additional "A_" for song 01, "B_" for song 02, etc at the beginning for the meta tags. It's not sexy, but it should work.

Edit: looking at one album, it appears it IGNORES the mp3info "track" field. I have my files named 01_<Title>.mp3, but then in metadata, I did:
Title: <Title>
Track: 01
That worked for our '15 Town and Country with Uconnect, IIRC.

I'll have to try with title being 01_<Title> to see if the Stinger likes that better..

No need to take extra steps when the problem is the player software. If it can play in proper order in one mode, it can do it in any (that the software author chooses to implement). I'm not manually re-numbering thousands of files because only one player is incompetently designed.

 

[stinger541]

If the Folder option is/was just a filing system, then why is it the only one that works/worked properly for USB stick-based music? Reverse of your logic...

No, it isn't....I want folder back, obviously. I think it is unusable without it. But it is just a file system and is based on what your USB is set up to do. That is why you can still browse through via the File option; you can pick the folder, so we know it reads it fine. However, 'Folder' as a PLAY option means that it just knows to play what is in that bucket, that file folder. It knows to stay in that bucket, shuffle within it, play from it, etc. By removing that as an option and going to 'File' only, they removed the bucket, the walls that told it where to look to play. So without that, it either plays by alpha in order, or it will shuffle/skip to any file within the entire USB, any file.

 

[Marc Collins]

No, it isn't....I want folder back, obviously. I think it is unusable without it. But it is just a file system and is based on what your USB is set up to do. That is why you can still browse through via the File option; you can pick the folder, so we know it reads it fine. However, 'Folder' as a PLAY option means that it just knows to play what is in that bucket, that file folder. It knows to stay in that bucket, shuffle within it, play from it, etc. By removing that as an option and going to 'File' only, they removed the bucket, the walls that told it where to look to play. So without that, it either plays by alpha in order, or it will shuffle/skip to any file within the entire USB, any file.

We're saying the same thing. I refused to update to v13 specifically because of the loss.

But why would Album not play in album order all along? Artist alphabetical yes/probably, but what possible logic is there to have "Album" play in alphabetical order? NONE. Except the people programming this are either incompetent or don't care because they assume everyone is using phone O/S-based music. That also explains the removal of an option. What possible rationale would KIA have to REMOVE an option, even if they thought only 1% of people were using it?!?! What harm would come from not removing it?

 

[MerlintheMad]

Back to this again? I read through these new/recent posts and see no further light and knowledge. I keep version 12. The only reason I'd want an upgrade is to get better/later maps. But that is completely not worth it if the music playback is in any way compromised.

 

[Berzerker]

I'm not really sure what problem people have been having with the media playback. Since the car's release, tracks in *all* views (file, album, and song) have been in alphabetical order. There's no magic to this. While you may have wanted it in track # order, this wasn't too difficult to figure out.

As for the "file/folder view" being removed, that's simply not true. The functionality, since release, and up to version 13.5, has been the folder was tapped, then an "up" button to go back to the previous directory became your top option. If you want to play subdirectories of a directory you're currently in, as well, you presumably want to play all of a single artist's music, of which you'd use the Artist view, instead.

That being said, there has been a huge redesign of the USB Media playback in version 13.5, where all media is ordered by tracks and subdirectories are included when music is played if you enable the repeat all option.

 

[Marc Collins]

I'm not really sure what problem people have been having with the media playback. Since the car's release, tracks in *all* views (file, album, and song) have been in alphabetical order. There's no magic to this. While you may have wanted it in track # order, this wasn't too difficult to figure out.

As for the "file/folder view" being removed, that's simply not true. The functionality, since release, and up to version 13.5, has been the folder was tapped, then an "up" button to go back to the previous directory became your top option. If you want to play subdirectories of a directory you're currently in, as well, you presumably want to play all of a single artist's music, of which you'd use the Artist view, instead.

That being said, there has been a huge redesign of the USB Media playback in version 13.5, where all media is ordered by tracks and subdirectories are included when music is played if you enable the repeat all option.

You are incorrect. Songs listed and played in album order when using the "Files" view (as one would expect) up to v12.5 (I can't speak to v13 directly because I refused to update to that based on this issue). What possible logic is there to play an album in alphabetical song order? So, the "Album" sort should have ALSO played in album order instead of only "Files" doing so. The "update" is backwards and quite honestly ridiculous.

What/where is the v13.5 you speak of?

 

[Berzerker]

You are incorrect. Songs listed and played in album order when using the "Files" view (as one would expect) up to v12.5 (I can't speak to v13 directly because I refused to update to that based on this issue). What possible logic is there to play an album in alphabetical song order? So, the "Album" sort should have ALSO played in album order instead of only "Files" doing so. The "update" is backwards and quite honestly ridiculous.

What/where is the v13.5 you speak of?

I’m not saying there’s any logic to it, just telling you what the reality was.

13.5 just came out. I posted some changes in the technology discussion thread for it.

 

[Marc Collins]

I’m not saying there’s any logic to it, just telling you what the reality was.

13.5 just came out. I posted some changes in the technology discussion thread for it.

Thanks for tip to the announcement. They have finally fixed what has been broken since the original version. Only took four revisions and two years (we reported this to KIA before the cars were even delivered in North America).