MyTouch Android 1.6 Bluetooth MP3 Issue

Wondering if anyone else has this issue and/or if they may have overcome it. My T-Mobile MyTouch with Android 1.6 OS paired fine as a phone and mp3 player. The mp3 player is less than perfect however.

1) When playing a track, the sound will stop for 1/2 a second at seemingly random intervals. It seems that it's more like the stream is being paused than the audio is just dropping out. I turned off all the auto-update features in the phone in case it was because the phone was checking for e-mail or something. It still happens.

2) When I take a call, the music stops, the call happens, and when I hang up the music plays out of the phone. I can re-connect the Bluetooth audio manually on the Nav screen Audio option and it's back to the car again.

Thoughts anyone?

 

Bump.

 

Another update: I have noticed that the MyTouch (HTC Hero) won't connect to the music player, but it does seem to connect to the phone. When we first got the car, it worked fine. I even had my phone on my desk with the car parked in the driveway about 10 feet away thru a closed window of hurricane glass. When my wife got in the car the next morning she was irate because I "did something" to make it play my Irish Trad music. Well I didn't do anything, it just linked to my phone when she turned it on. And I had got in and out of the car a number of times and the bluetooth automatically connected just fine.

Then, it decided it wouldn't connect. The only way I could get a connection was to remove my phone from the audio list, remove the car from the phone's bluetooth pairings, and start over. After entering the pair code the pairing would work and the connect would work an I had music. Until I got out, and then I had no music until I did the setup all over again.

I since then got a replacement phone of the same kind and it/the car had the same problem from the start.

Yesterday I spent some time trying to find a quicker solution that starting over with registering. I have found that I can make the connection take if I hit the connect button on both the nav and the phone at the same time. It doesn't work 100% of the time, but usually it only take three tries to get it to connect.

So rather than leave my phone in bluetooth on mode, I turn bluetooth off when I get out of the car. When I next get in, I start the car, go to the Audio BT tab and go to the phone bluetooth control form. I hit connect on both and hope. If it fails, repeat. So far that's the best I can do. The phone is running Android 1.6 by the way. I'm supposed to get Android 2.2 at some point in the future OTA from T-Mobile. Hopefully it will fix the BT problem. I'll let you know what happens.

 

No, sorry to say I don't have a fix, but to force it to work, I disconnect the music connection, disconnect the phone, then connect the phone and then connect the music and the music comes out of the car. Sometimes if I get in the car and turn it on, then remember bluetooth is off in the phone and turn it on, it won't connect properly and I have to do the off/off/on/on dance. Sometimes it easier to just turn the car off, turn BT on in the phone and then start the car again.

I've decided the pauses are the phone not being able to keep the stream full. I wish there was a/a larger buffer to skip over the drop-outs.

 

I'm learning to live with the connection issue by always turning on the bluetooth in my phone before I start the car. That seems to work fine. Then, if I get a phone call that interrupts the music it sometimes comes back on but out of the phone. I push the pause/play buttons on the screen and it comes back out the car.

But the pauses or drop-outs in the music make me crazy sometimes. Why is it so hard to buffer a little sound? Does anyone work in the bluetooth industries and can comment who has dropped the ball here? Is it the phone's job to keep the pipe full, or is it the player's job to buffer a few seconds for the unexpected? I'd like to at least complain to the appropriate party.

I can cause the drop-out by asking the phone to do something that makes it think. Like open my mail app for example. But it does it by itself too, I'm sure when background processes usurp the CPU.

 

I don't think the MyTouch has a USB music player that works with the Prius. I'll have another go, but if I recall, the two don't play well together that way either.

Sad.