I have a 2013. When I first got it I plugged my IPod in to the USB port and everything worked as advertised. In fact it played immediately, without indexing to my recollection. However last Saturday, something changed, or I did something inadvertently and the unit reported "Index Full", I think. Now the USB function repeatedly plays the last artist I asked it to play and has begun indexing. When it gets to 400 (songs?), it starts over and continues this ignoring all commands to play something else with the response "indexing please wait"

I've read the manual and set AutoPlay to "On" which, according to the manual allows the unit to play indexed songs without having to index the entire IPOD (some 885 songs in my case) but the unit continues to loop through the indexing sequence or whatever it's doing while continuing to play the last song (artist) requested. I don't think there's anything wrong with the unit, I think I've done something that I do not remember.

I'm uneducated about all of these things, not evening owning a cell phone and only sort of understanding my IPod. The only thing I can think of is that maybe the OEM head can only index 400 songs, which would account for the message "Index Full", but not for this looping continually indexing out to 400 songs (I guess) and then starting over. I think the problem is owner error, but I don't know what.

Please help if you can I've grown tired of the same song. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanking you, in advance, I remain,

Curtis

 

take your i pod. flip the top switch to lock then unlock. Then hold th top and center of the dial for about 30 seconds. an apple will appear then once your screen comes back in plug the unit back in.
I have to do this every so often because the I-pod does get garbled with the sync from time to time. I think Apple execs drive Chevy's

 

Reset Sync, there is an option under the phone menu choices.

 

USB thumb drive. I have one with over 250 albums on it and tested it briefly in a car at the dealership. My 2014 has not arrived yet. My thumb drive is 32GB and only about 1" long. I plan to plug it in and leave it there.

 

Thanks Bradgtcs. Have followed your directions, and will go out and plug it back in directly. While there Ace22Ace, I will see if I can find the "reset synch" under the phone menu. Not having a cell phone, understandably, I have never spent much time on the phone menu. Interestingly, I noted that about 1/3 of the owner's manual (it seems) is devoted to learning to use the phone. I was beginning to think I'd purchased a phone support system, instead of that gorgeous Coyote 5.0 liter V-8!

Curtis

 

Bradgtcs,

Well the IPod behaved exactly as you stated, but when I plugged it back in, the screen "autoplay unavailable" and then a different "indexing message appeared, one which had a little repeating progress bar with the word indexing. As before, when I asked it to "Play All", was informed as before, that it was indexing an to please wait.

ace72ace, tried the phone menu, and all I would raise was the msg: "no phone paired" and of course, I have none to provide.

Anyway thanks for the efforts.

Curtis

 

well the only other option is maybe the I-pod went bad. shortly after I got my car My-ipod decided to go down for the count. I had to get a new one and had all sorts of issues. So I reloaded from scratch and that helped. still have to resync once in a while but that is not often.

 

Not happening Bradgtcs, I'm listening to the IPod as I write this. I'll figure it out, I'm sure it's user error and when I do, I will post my findings.

Cheers and thanks,

Curtis

 

http://support.ford.com/sync-technol...et-sync#reload

 

I go through this every month or so. The only fix I've found isdisconnecting the battery. Pulling the sync fuse is supposed to work too but Ican't find it.

The way I understand it, sync doesn't look at song count it looks at totalnumber of characters when that reaches 1,000,000 you get "index full"message and pretty much no control over you ipod. You can disconnect it selecta play list and plug it back in but all voice commands and button commandsthrough the radio are useless.

I've called sync support, no solution. I asked the dealer when the car was there for an oil change and they said sometimes sync just needs a reset (battery or fuse unplug). It pretty much sux.

 

Thanks!

Why not do what ace72ace suggests?

 

good luck I know how frustrating this can be. your not alone.

 

Well ace72ace,

I did the master reset, and your directions were flawless and the unit reset. However I'm still indexing! I'm going to the dealer and see what I can discover. I'm a retired attorney and perhaps I can put a little fear into their small black hearts.

This is outrageous. Next a poll of those who have had this problem might be in order as there is power in numbers. Only I don't know how to set up a poll.

Thanks for all your efforts.

Curtis

 

Doesn't work.

 

Well this 'index loop' also happened to me also. Disconnecting the battery for 5 minutes or so fixed it. Did this before I found the posted procedure for master reset. After my last disonnect - had to do it 2 or 3 times, don't recall - I made sure that whenever I connected my iPhone to my USB port in the console, that it was attached to the cable before starting the ignition. Since I have done this I have yet to get another index loop.

Yeah it sucks you will have to set your clock and your radio station presets, but the Sync now works, and you can hit your Sync button, say USB, and 'Play artist foo' or 'Play song blah' and you are good to go.

 

I too am an apple fan boy... so your saying a work around would be to simply plug the Ipod/Phone into the USB connection BEFORE starting the ignition, then we should never ever encounter this issue?
Sounds good to me! Glad I read this post!

 

Well I always left my IPod plugged in when the car was not in use, so it was always plugged in when the vehicle was started. For whatever this might be worth.

You guys saying that disconnecting the battery ONCE will fix this problem for good, at least as far as you know. If so I will do it, but if this happenstance is going to be a periodic reoccurrence I'm going to FMCO for a fix. We shouldn't have to put up with this in the car. Of course, we have FOMCO, MicroSoft and Apple, who can each blame one or two of the others. Nevertheless, we shouldn't have to suffer this indignity so if there is no permanent fix as far as you guys know, then I going to try to get something done.

Cheers,

Curtis

 

I am not offering any guarantee or being a fortune teller predicting future problem free operation. I have been a techie for over 20 years now, and I look at issues like this a little differently than most 'end users'. When attempting to determine the root cause of any technical problem, the first thing you do is educate yourself. RTFM. Check the compatibly and specifications of the components, verify procedures, and so on.

This index loop, IMHO, isn't caused by 1 single problem all the time, it's likely X number of possible root causes, triggered by Y sequence of events. Not that any of the above information matters to someone who just wants to play their music or podcast in their car, they just want something that works. If you sampled all the index looping problems, you would fill a bucket with iphone users, one with android users, etc. However from each of those buckets you have smaller one's with iPhone 4's 5s, flavors of IOS on each. The number of variables seems to multiply exponentially.

Assuming you have a compatible device, running a compatible IOS or firmware version, I believe it's non standard file name formatting that causes the problem. If you had a music library program on your Mac (iTunes) or Windows (Windows Media Player or other program) and all you ever did was populate your library with source content that listed the Artist, Album & Song Title uniformly, the index loop would likely never occur. Sync experiences this loop because it tries to offer the user the capability to go directly to a song, artist, album, or playlist. So if you browse your own music library, I can almost guarantee you will find some inconsistencies in one of these four categories.

One of the most common problems is the artist. AD/DC isn't the same as ACDC or AC-DC and so on. File systems hate hate hate duplicate file names, it's unacceptable to have the same file name in the same directory. It's against the rules. But when you have subtly different artist or song names, problems arise. Sync is a complex system designed to offer you powerful features and options. It works great when you play by the rules and feed it music data in the expected format. I have a hunch that rather than be super strict in recognizing and playing certain types of various naming conventions, Sync allows many of them in the hope that the end user will primarily use this single format. Mix and match all different kinds with a lot of duplicates and you are asking for trouble.

So that's the long winded best guess on my part, your mileage may vary. My advice to anyone having this problem is to go through your music library and then sort by artist or song. Windows tries to make things easy for the end user and doesn't present the gory details that are possible to see on a Mac if you look under the hood.

Here's a few examples from my macbook;

81M ./iTunes Media/Music/AC_DC/Back In Black
56M ./iTunes Media/Music/AC_DC/Fly On The Wall(Remastered)
55M ./iTunes Media/Music/AC_DC/For Those About To Rock (We Salute You)
40M ./iTunes Media/Music/AC_DC/High Voltage
37M ./iTunes Media/Music/AC_DC/Highway to Hell
73M ./iTunes Media/Music/AC_DC/If You Want Blood You've Got I
55M ./iTunes Media/Music/AC_DC/Powerage(Remastered)
397M ./iTunes Media/Music/AC_DC <--- Duplicate artist (note the size in column 1)
33M ./iTunes Media/Music/Academy of St. Martin in the Fields & Sir Neville Marriner/Mozart_ Eine kleine Nachtmusik & Pachelbel_ Canon
33M ./iTunes Media/Music/Academy of St. Martin in the Fields & Sir Neville Marriner <--Truncated
64M ./iTunes Media/Music/ACDC/The Razor's Edge(Remastered)
52M ./iTunes Media/Music/ACDC/Who Made Who(Remastered)
116M ./iTunes Media/Music/ACDC <--- Duplicate artist (note the size in column 1 it's different from AC_DC)

Other types of duplicates I found were truncated song names. [edit: This could just be how iTunes handles artist category, thus why the total of all the albums matching this artist in column 1 equals the total of just the artist] Why they exist in my library I have no idea, but I just plug it into Sync and hope it works. The expression garbage in/garbage out applies here in spades. If you have a library that is littered with all kinds of crap, you expect Sync to wave a magic wand and miraculously sort through the mess of your scattered collection of this and that? Sorry, not Sync's fault.

5.9M ./iTunes Media/Music/Aubrey Haynie _ Gillian Welch _ Mark Knopfler _ Paul Franklin _ Rawlins, David/Sailing to Philadelphia
5.9M ./iTunes Media/Music/Aubrey Haynie _ Gillian Welch _ Mark Knopfler _ Paul Franklin _ Rawlins, David <-- Truncated

5.0M ./iTunes Media/Music/Chris Rodriguez _ Danny Cummings _ Davis, Tim _ Frank Ricotti _ Mark Knopfler _ Mike Haynes/Sailing to Philadelphia
5.0M ./iTunes Media/Music/Chris Rodriguez _ Danny Cummings _ Davis, Tim _ Frank Ricotti _ Mark Knopfler _ Mike Haynes <-- Truncated

These 'various artists' kill me, and likely other music library programs. So you have a song that was written by 4 people, and it's embedded into the file name, what the hell is Sync supposed to do with this? I don't know, do you? These are the types of problems programmers face all the time. So they make a decision based upon the highest probability of a desirable outcome.

Now look at this snippet;

78M ./iTunes Media/Music/Compilations/Physical Graffiti [Disc 1]
4.4M ./iTunes Media/Music/Compilations/Rob Zombie_ Past, Present & Future
40M ./iTunes Media/Music/Compilations/The Orange Box
4.8M ./iTunes Media/Music/Compilations/The Very Best of the A&M Years (1977-1988)
2.9M ./iTunes Media/Music/Compilations/Transformers (Soundtrack from the Motion Picture)
340M ./iTunes Media/Music/Compilations
43M ./iTunes Media/Music/Corrosion of Conformity/America's Volume Dealer
43M ./iTunes Media/Music/Corrosion of Conformity
64M ./iTunes Media/Music/Creedence Clearwater Revival/Chronicle, Vol. 1
64M ./iTunes Media/Music/Creedence Clearwater Revival
55M ./iTunes Media/Music/Dane Cook/Harmful If Swallowed Disc 1
48M ./iTunes Media/Music/Dane Cook/Retaliation - Disc I
47M ./iTunes Media/Music/Dane Cook/Retaliation - Disc II
150M ./iTunes Media/Music/Dane Cook
2.8M ./iTunes Media/Music/Danny Cummings _ Mark Knopfler/Sailing to Philadelphia
2.8M ./iTunes Media/Music/Danny Cummings _ Mark Knopfler

We have Disc 1 / Disc I and Disc II, and file names with all kinds of special characters, "/ & ! [ ] ( ) _ -" I can't imagine how many lines of code it takes to handle all of these non alphabetic & numeric characters and their permutations. All it takes for the index loop to kick in could be one truncated ) at the end of long file name when Sync gets in a funky state, and then you are stuck.

OK, fine. Now that we this phone book of information, why does yanking the battery cable at least temporarily resolve the problem? It clears the cache on Sync. Computing devices that perform complex functions almost always have some form of cache to speed up repetitive tasks. When the cache becomes corrupted by whatever means, clearing it can temporarily solve the problem. I have no idea what kind of error checking or buffer that Sync employs to try and handle funky file names and duplicates. It is possible to have an iPod that will work for say 10 more times after yanking the cable but then you exceed some threshold, and you are back to the index loop. Why? Because you didn't clean up your music library, you are back to garbage in/garbage out, and you have exceeded Sync's ability to deal with it. Pure supposition and guess work on my part - no factual data other than observation of actual events and drawing my own conclusions based upon my own experiences in computer hardware and software.

One thing you can do (after you clean up your library) is get yourself a small USB thumb drive, and copy over all your music that appears to be in the same format (for file naming convention) and no duplicate artists/albums. I would bet 999 out of 1000 thumb drives would work flawlessly. Test it in the console USB port, and if it works fine, connect it to the 2nd USB port on the Sync module. There have been other threads on this, so I'm not going to cover it here. Search is your friend.

I am not affiliated with Ford or Microsoft but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night...

 

NO disconnecting the battery will fix it for a little while, until the memory fills up? I've had to disconnect my battery to resovle this issue probably 4 or 5 times in 9 months.

 

Thanks Ace72ace,

See I just made a "new" name for you. Your explanation makes a lot of since, at least to someone born B/C (before computers).

I think I'll try the thumb drive option with a library cleanup. At least that way, I can control the garbage in side of the equation. In that regard, I don't understand why I would test in the console USB port and then switch to second USB port on the Synch module, whose location is unknown to this reporter.

Try the Hilton next time.......................

Curtis