dsafety

I have a, new-to-me 2013 Boxster S. Terrific car but I have been struggling with the limitations of the PCM. I have a few thousand musical tracks which are stored on my Android phone. I can play them using the Aux BT feature but the PCM system sometimes fails to activate Aux BT and when it eventually connects, playlists are not available. This can be a little annoying. Plugging the Android phone into the USB port results in the message that no music files can be found. On to plan B.

I have a decommissioned iPhone on which I have loaded the music files. Plugging this device into the USB port activates the iPod feature in PCM. This solution works quite well. The phone lives in the glove box and PCM fires it up when I start the car. This setup gives me access to playlists and all the other search features, (artist, album, genre, etc). My concern is that with the possibility of battery fires and similar cell phone disasters, I am uncomfortable leaving the phone plugged in and turned on all the time but too forgetful to always unplug and turn the phone off. Maybe I should try plan C.

I bought a 64mb USB drive, formatted it to Fat 32, (Fat EX will not work), loaded it with my music files and plugged this drive into the car's USB port. Despite the success that some people have had importing iTunes files to the USB drive and getting album art along with playlists, I have only been able to get the music folders to be recognized by PCM. I do not miss the album art but the lack of playlists is a deal breaker for me, so I came up with the following hack.

After loading your music library to the USB drive, go back to iTunes, (or whatever music manager you use), and open up the playlist that you would like to access on PCM. I used iTunes so these instructions will apply to the way this program handles the files. Create an empty folder on your PC's desktop and give it the name of your playlist. Select all the music tracks from your playlist displayed in the iTunes window. Left-click the selection and drag it to your empty desktop folder.

For the next step you will have to use an MP3 tag editor. Probably any would work. I used a free program called MP3Tag. Load the music files from your recently created playlist folder into the tag editor. Navigate to the genre column. Replace all the genre tags with something new. For my project, I created the genre "favorites". Save the modified file back to your desktop folder.

Go back to iTunes and add all the modified music files to your music collection. At that point, you will have two copies of all the songs that you have just processed. One will have the original genre tag, the other will have the new tag that you just assigned.

You are almost done. Copy all of your music files on to your freshly formatted USB drive. This can take some time. When the files have been copied, plug the USB drive into the USB port in your Porsche. After a few minutes PCM will recognize that you have the USB drive plugged in and will begin to index the files. This also takes some time. Eventually, PCM will let you select USB and you will be presented with a bunch of selection options. One of them is "Find Music". Select this and one of the options will be "Genre" . Select this and scroll through all the genre options until you find your newly created genre, (Favorites for me). Select this and your playlist will start playing.

This hack takes a little time but it is really quite easy. The next time you start the car, PCM will remember that you want to play music from USB and your previously selected playlist. If you have a Boxster, put the top down, turn up the volume and go for a drive serenaded by your favorite tunes.

I have also discovered a couple of things to do to make the music playback more enjoyable, at least for me. Check the "shuffle" option if you prefer a random music selection. If you have a Bose sound system, be sure to click on the sound button and activate "surround sound". This makes a huge difference. If you are an old guy like me with some high frequency hearing loss, bump up the treble and maybe the base a bit. The "linear" option is also worth trying. It tames the base a bit so your music sounds more balanced.

If you have the Jukebox feature, you should be able to transfer all the files on your USB drive. Apparently my car was built before the Jukebox was a standard feature. I have tried a number of times but I cannot get the Jukebox option to display on my PCM. A guy at my local Porsche dealership says that Jukebox was not activated for some early 2013 cars. I am not sure about this so if anyone has a suggestion as to how to get the Jukebox to display on my PCM, I would love to hear about it.

Enjoy, Bob

ramans

Nice work, I use a 128gb key in most of my cars ( ) with all my music on it.

What I do is use MediaMonkey to organise the key, I have it setup with a rule which puts the artists into folders that are like this
ABC
DEF
HIJ
etc...

Then under each of those there's an artist folder and under that an album folder. This seems to work quite well.

Somewhere I read that someone had success getting media monkey to output a playlist that worked by using relative folder offsets for each track and you could use the build in playlist functionality. I did it by making folders under P/Playlist with the songs I wanted in them and setting the album name of each of those tracks to the name of the playlist, I'd prefer to find a way to make the playlist work, but try as I might I can't find that post again, if anyone else does find it please let us know!

s-fury

I always use spotify on my android phone, streaming it with Bluetooth to the pcm.
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