Thanks Sandy. That really excited me, so I installed iOS 5.1 on my iPhone 4 and gave it a try with the iPhone connector on my ACM. Trying with Spotify and Audible, I'm happy to see a couple improvements: the track info is displayed in the Jaguar and short bursts of sound plays before the operation pauses my iPhone. I once got a full song to play before it stopped. But the solution is still not working the whole way for me.

My car is a 2010 XKR, so one year behind yours. Perhaps there is a firmware update for the car's audio/nav system. Does anyone happen to know if there's a way to install this without buying the full maps update (which seems to be much more expensive than a few map updates could possibly be worth)?

Ed

 

Btw, I did have a local shop patch a line into the fiber optics system of the car that can override the car stereo and play from an 1/8" jack. It's not an ideal solution since it requires flipping a hidden switch and it has a number of hiccups, but it's been getting me by while I keeping working and waiting on the real deal.

 

Sorry to burst your bubble, but the fact that the transmitter box is or isn't screwed to the car makes no difference to its sound quality. Its really a technicality given its going over FM anyway but actually with a permanently installed one you would get a tiny but unavoidable amount of power line noise in the signal, which you wouldn't get from a portable battery powered one.

Both portable and permanent installs are identical in that your connection to the head unit is via a transmitted FM radio signal, not wire. That method is unavoidably going to degrade your sound quality in exactly the same way that CD sound quality is noticeably better than FM radio. Consider that the broadcasting station uses very expensive studio-grade audio equipment, yet your car CD player is worth a fraction of that equipment but sounds much better at your end. The reason is, the extra step converting to, transmitting, then converting from radio frequency is unavoidably quite lossy, even if the distance between the transmitter and receiver is negligible.

 

Finally got iPhone 4 streaming working on my 2010 XKR. Had an insight: add at least 1 song to the Music app via iTunes. After I did that, it just works.

 

Before I ordered my XK last week, I checked out how it would interface with my iPhone 4S. I plugged my phone into the iPod jack, and as you said, it automatically connects to the iTunes part of the phone, however, once I opened up my MOG app, and hit the play button, it immediately switched and started playing from that app. (I prefer MOG over any of the other streaming services.) At any rate, it works just fine, although I don't know how that will affect using the phone as a phone. :-)

 

It turns out the ipod connector has line-level audio on it, (i.e. the same signal as buying/installing an ACM module just to get an RCA connector would get you).
Here are the pinouts:
Apple iPod, iPad and iPhone dock Connector Pinout - AllPinouts

Consequently it should be trivial to make an adaptor to plug into the cars ipod connector that also provides 3.5mm or RCA input by teeing off or switching out just those 4 (L+R + 2 grounds) wires.

Not having tried it, but I can guess a possible small downside is that it may still need to have an ipod plugged in for the data handshaking before the head unit thinks it needs to play audio on that input.

 

Ed,

I discovered the exact same thing that you had to have at least 1 song in the Music app to solve the Pausing issue. However, when you are streaming through spotify, rhapsody, etc. are you able to skip songs using the steering wheel or dash controls? When I do this it pauses spotify (pandora or whatever other streaming app) and starts to play the song I have loaded in the Music app.

So basically at this point the iPod / iPhone integration is useless for me if I can't advance / skip Spotify songs using the Jaguar controls. The only way I can skip/advance songs is on the iPhone directly.

What have you encountered?

Thanks,
Jason

 

Jason, I've had the same issue as you. When I use the physical controls either on the steering wheel or on the dash, it jumps ahead in the songs that are on my device. I think there's a hack that apple uses to make the line controls work, and likely they had to do this because the Jaguar interface doesn't handle this like other accessory manufacturers do. It would be great to have this resolved and also to get charging working for road trips. (since I got Naomi--my XKR--I've become a road trip enthusiast!) There is a new major version of iOS announced to come out -- maybe it will have updates to address this. Fingers crossed.

For now, still thrilled to have spotify and audible able to play through the car, the other things are just gravy as far as I'm concerned. I just treat it like a line-in solution.

Best,
Ed

 

FWIW, I figured out what the deal was with Pandora. My cell phone went belly up and got replaced under warranty with an exact duplicate. I re-downloaded Pandora and Spotify then attempted to use them with the radio & steering wheel controls. Everything worked without a hitch - could advance the songs once again using the button on the left hand side of the wheel.

My only conclusion was that I must have dowloaded something on the original phone which caused a conflict, either that or when I deleted some of the bloat and ad-ware, I inadvertently took some key piece of software that prevented Pandora from recognizing the inputs from the stereo and steering wheel control.

Moral of the story is when all else fails, try a different cell phone/iPod and/or do a factory reset on the device and start clean. Never know what might happen.

 

Burg,

Very interesting. What year is your XK8 and what type of phone do you have?

Jason

 

See signature - 1997. As for the phone, it's a Motorola Droid 3 Global from Verizon. Should work pretty much the same for most smart phones using Pandora or Spotify. Not sure about the iPhone.