iPod necessary?

With the addition of hard drives in our cars now is the iPod integration option a waste of money? Or is the ease of navigating between songs and albums just worth the price?

friends who have songs can listen on your car or download their songs to your car

It depends on the size of your music collection. From the specs I've found the hard drive is about 8Gb, I have an 80Gb iPod that stays in my car.

Also music with DRM copy protection can not be played back.

The other thing I regularly do is connect my iPhone to the iPod connector in the car and use it to stream Pandora or Slacker radio. . . now with the new combox funcitonality this may no longer be necessary.

So for me it's worth the money.

If you listen to your iPod a lot, you should get the integration.

FYI, if you import a "music collection" on the internal hard drive, the individual song titles are available on the nav screen and via the steering wheel/dash display. It was too late to add the iPod/USB feature when I ordered my car, so I've loaded my music library on the 8GB disk and can navigate through the songs, and set random playback if desired.

Originally Posted by markl53

FYI, if you import a "music collection" on the internal hard drive, the individual song titles are available on the nav screen and via the steering wheel/dash display. It was too late to add the iPod/USB feature when I ordered my car, so I've loaded my music library on the 8GB disk and can navigate through the songs, and set random playback if desired.

With the iPod you can also individual titles on the center screen when you turn the right scroll wheel. You can set random playback using the iPod.

Originally Posted by edspider

If you listen to your iPod a lot, you should get the integration.

I agree. I don't think any of the music you purchase on iTunes is importable onto the car's hard drive per the manual. I suppose if you have imported a ton of music from personal CDs into iTunes, you could move that unprotected music to a flash drive and then import it in the car, but if you also buy a lot of music (DRM protected stuff) and place it on your iPod, then I guess the adapter is more of a must if you want to listen to that music.

Also, if music is very important to a person, then I'd guess the hifi stereo system would be too, and the iPod adapter comes with the Premium package.

I like to keep all of my favorite playlists on my iPhone, turn on the Bluetooth, plug my iPhone in with the adapter, and then I get all of my favorite music through the car, my iPhone stays charged for when I leave the car, and if someone calls me, I pick up the call through the car.

I need to spend some time reading my manual to figure this hard drive thing out...

First, from what I have read, encoding for the internal hard drive is at minimum rates and is not user adjustable. The sound quality of higher bit rate songs on an iPod should be considerably better. Second, if you have a large collection, 8GB is not sufficient. Third, if you like your playlists on the iPod, you will need to duplicate them in some way.

Originally Posted by wessew

First, from what I have read, encoding for the internal hard drive is at minimum rates and is not user adjustable.

I don't think the files are re-encoded; it is just a straight copy.