Infotainment, Bluetooth audio, and metadata

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Apr 7, 2025
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Emira Owner
I am stymied by the Emira's QNX infotainment system. When using my phone with some 30,000 odd songs on a 256GB micro-SD card, I can not get the album cover art metadata to show on either display. Has anyone had any luck getting cover art to render on their infotainment system? I have upped the phone's MAP to 1.4 and AVRCP to 1.6 and still had no luck. I have also noticed that the infotainment software supports only bare bones codecs: SBC and AAC. Not even aptX or even LDAC which you might expect in a premium KEF sound system. Nope, just 320kbps.

I'm also dipping my toes into Android Auto but I'm not liking how clunky it is. And how easily confused it can become. If the phone connects to the car with AA, but I press <play> on an Android music app on the phone, it will play through the sound system, all the while the infotainment system is telling me that it's playing a radio station. If I try to skip forward or back using the steering wheel buttons, then I get the radio through the sound system. Also, after using AA, and well away from the car, my phone's WiFi remains on. I try to keep it turned off for the most part because I don't expect to connect to rando networks, and don't need the continuous power drain. Honestly, I would not use Android Auto at all if the Bluetooth service just supported album art metadata.

I have tried the USB option too. Simply scanning a 32GB thumb drive took minutes, and it must re-scan every time the car is started. I tried a USB 3.1 (5 Gbps) housing with a 1 TB NVMe gen 4 flash memory (all FLAC files) in the USB C interface under the center console, and it never finished scanning. I'm guessing that the USB C port is only USB 2 speed, and the infotainment system is not optimized to scan external drives. So disappointing.

My goal here is to make the music selection and playback accessible to my passenger while I'm driving.

Any suggestions?
 
I use Android Auto and use Symfonium to play my music (a mixture of FLAC and MP3). I tried a few players but found Symfonium to be the one I preferred. Seems to work well, album art works well. This works fine with the Emira steering wheel buttons; next/prev track, pause, play.

I don't have my music on an micro-SD though - I stream all my music from a home server using JellyFin - about 240GB of files, roughly 500 CDs worth.

Also worth bearing in mind that transfer speeds of microSD cards can be significantly slower than USB.
 
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