Toyota Entune Forum

I have the JBL Premium system in my 2015 Camry XLE. The media player using flash drives with MP3s is so badly designed and executed that had I known it I would not have purchased the car. It's bad enough that the system has no ability to remember your playlist when you turn the engine off and has to re-index the drive when the it's turned back on but it can't even do what a $30 MP3 player can. I've had the car for three months and up until last week I could have sworn that when Random was on, the system could shuffle tracks within a given album or genre. What I noticed last week was that if I let the player change tracks on its own it would go right down its own dynamic playlist which is sorted by artist alphabetically. The only way that it would shuffle was if I changed tracks manually with the control on the steering wheel. I had several conversations with Entune Support and the last one was with someone higher up on the food chain who agreed that this didn't sound right. He contacted my dealer and the car is with them now for investigation into the problem. Well, here's the shocker. I have a 2015 Corolla S as a loaner and it does not shuffle tracks on its own within an album either. It's behavior is exactly the same as the Camry's. I am now wondering if the Camry's system ever shuffled tracks or if I was just changing them manually without thinking about it. I have a flash drive with around 22 GB of MP3s but they have good ID3 tags and are in folders with no more than 254 files in each. Albums. genres, artists all call up normally but again, Random (or shuffle) does not work without a manual change. If this is how the latest Entune systems have been designed, it's almost beyond comprehension. Random or shuffle play is done by every MP3 player out there and has worked since the very first players or Ipods were introduced. I'm terribly disappointed that Toyota could allow an audio system so lacking to be used in their cars. When I get the car back and am invariably told that that's how the system was designed, I'll have to do some serious thinking about whether a 5+ year investment in the Camry is what I want. I have an extensive MP3 collection that cuts across many genres and use them in the car more than radio or satellite. That may be the tipping point.

While the Camry is at the dealer I've been playing around with my MP3 ID3 tags and have discovered that Random play will work but only if within a given album, the MP3s track number are precisely numbered in exact sequence. So in my Rock album which has 787 tracks spread out among 4 folders (Rock 1, Rock 2, etc) with no more than 254 files in each and multiple artists, the track numbers have to go from 1 to 787 or the system can't shuffle them. My Smooth Jazz album with 1356 tracks spread over 6 folders is now likewise precisely numbered and will now shuffle. This is all on the Corolla loaner that I'm using right now but I assume that the basic and Premium audio systems operate in similar ways. I'm taking a test flash drive to my dealer this morning to try it in the Camry. If it works, we'll consider that issue "solved" although the indexing process that the system does through every time you start the car is still a PITA.

Random play now works in the Camry but only after I did major revisions of a lot of ID3 tags. So in the end I had to figure it out myself because neither Entune tech support nor my dealer's service folks had any idea as to what was happening. Not exactly inspiring but at least it's resolved.