My car did not come with the iPod adapter option but how easy and what are the costs for integrating an iPod kit now? I looked through Crutchfield.com and it did not have any adapters available for our Navi units but there's gotta be something (unless only from Audi?).

Any thoughts are appreciated.

<ul><li><a href="http://forums.audiworld.com/audio/msgs/62991.phtml">Link</a></li></ul>

put all my music on SD cards and see the data on the screen. This will not happen with the iPod as I understand it and of course you loose the cd player

Plus the SD cards are yet ANOTHER device to continuously keep updated (in addition to my 2 ipods) and they are a PITA to deal with. Title length limits, lack of real playlist support, no dynamic playlists, and being more tempermental. (I have a couple songs that just will not play off the SD card, no matter how I change the mp3tag/filename)

I never was able to get a response about the SD cards limitations. From this forum and the manual it seems that it is 512 files that can be read but it is NOT clear whether that is 512 PER SD CARD or 512 in total (whether it be across 2 cards or all on 1).

Any idea of which it is??

very hard to find the 4 gig but 2 gigs are readily available

info displayed/controlled from the Nav unit. I got over dealing with external devices and non-OEM control integration when I quit doing big custom stereos in my cars. I just can't stand having to look at an iPod or other device that isn't fully detailed on the main Nav screen. It's not safe and it looks cheap to me to have wires running out of the glovebox to a cradle or ipod sitting somewhere.

When someone gets wise, they will offer an iPod cradle that sits in the armrest (or glovebox I guess), charges the iPod while it's connected, and gives me 100% control/display functionality from the Nav unit. If they did all of this and it was compatible with an iPhone, I'd gladly pay the cancellation fee to drop Verizon and pick up whatever the highest capacity iPhone is. I think that would really be the dream solution right there. Phone, music, and complete OEM integration in a single device/interface.

I have the adapter, but I hate iPods (and especially iTunes).

The SD cards are a way better option anyway, the iPod adapter is pretty crappy in it's integration. No song titles or anything like that.

I'll really miss SD cards in my next Audi, so easy to swap, and nearly indestructable. And really cheap.

other random (still unknown) factor. Plays on every computer based mp3 player as well as in my ipod. Its just an mp3.. just play it! Nope. Skips it every time.

They remove the protection and convert to mp3 format.

If you google there are a ton of programs that do it relatively cheap and the cost is really limited by the amount of songs to be done at once.

and need to be converted. This is why I only buy through Amazon mp3 now, since those downloads are already in mp3 format and can be dragged and dropped right onto the SD cards.

from what I have read and that does away with the DRM I thought

less restrictive DRM, but I hadn't read that you could do away with it altogether. That would be nice if they finally did that. I frankly can't see why anyone would buy from iTunes with their DRM being as restrictive as it is/was. The Amazon downloader software will even put your downloads into your iTunes library after the download is complete.

<ul><li><a href="http://askbobrankin.com/convert_itunes_to_mp3_format.html">convert iTunes</a></li></ul>

The ipod is charged while connected and is fully controllable from the head unit. I wrote a quick post about it recently as the A8 loaner car I had was equiped with the AMI/MMI inteface. I hooked it up to my ipod Touch and it worked flawlessly so an iphone should work fine too.

I agree that the arm rest is a better place for it from my point of view as it is generally much easier to access.

I seem to remember that you might be a Mac user, so perhaps it's a Mac thing ?

Now if someone would just do a firmware retrofit for the RNS-E, I'd be in business ;)

Nice to see that OEM interfaces are getting this far, though. Did that A8 have live traffic info too? That's the other thing on my wishlist. I know that the Q5 is supposed to get it.

I'd actually put up with the glovebox location in exchange for the other functionality.

The screen for weather looked just like one would see on tv - the pics I saw of the traffic info was very good.

It'd be nice if they would be a little more leading edge in the Nav department.

Will copy files with the generated short (8.3) names, which will work.