(There's no CarPlay forum!)
I was very excited for CarPlay, in fact it was one of the reasons I waited to order the 2016 Stingray (instead of a 2015).
Here's some of my experiences so far:
1. It's an absolute disaster in CarPlay trying to view albums by a specific artist. I literally couldn't find a way to do this. If you click on albums you get a list of EVERY album by all artists on your phone in random order except the first few which seem to be the most recently played. If you click on an artist in the artists tab it immediately starts playing a song from that artist and then sequentially continues through every song from that artist. There is simply no way to list all albums by a particular artist! That is unbelievable, especially considering that I'm easily able to do it in Chevrolet MyLink. Does anyone know why this happens? Has it happened to you?
For example I selected the artist Meat Loaf. I have all of his albums on my iPhone including Bat Out Of Hell 1, 2, & 3. In the album list I selected Meat Loaf, a few of his albums were shown because I had recently played them but there was no way to load the rest. In particular I wanted to play Bat Out Of Hell II which wasn't listed and resulted in absolute insanity trying to get it to play. I figured I'd outsmart CarPlay and told Siri "play Meatloaf Bat Out Of Hell 2", every single time it went to the first song on Bat Out Of Hell 1. So then I changed the Siri command to "Play Bat Out Of Hell T W O". I spelled out the number 2. Her response? "Now playing Bat Out Of Hell 3!!!!" It consistently did this every time. In the end I never got Bat Out Of Hell 2 to play but it did ultimately give me a laugh.
2. When selecting the artists tab sometimes I am presented with a very convenient A-Z list between the up and down arrows on the right where I can jump to artists that start with a specific letter, very handy. The problem is that at least 90% of the time the artists tab does not offer me this option. There's no rhyme or reason as to why it appears only occasionally that I can discern.
3. There's no way to disable CarPlay if I want to exclusively use the MyLink system built into the car, which I am really considering.
4. I experienced a very loud shriek for lack of a better term twice during a song on iTunes Radio.
5. Even though I didn't select CarPlay on the screen a text message that came in popped up on the screen with a CarPlay notification.
6. Siri works really well most of the time when requesting specific music to be played. It'll find a track by name even if the artist isn't spoken. I did have one comical situation where Siri simply crashed and burned, see #1 above.
7. The interface is not the most visually stimulating, it's kind of on the boring side of things. But my son pointed something out to me that altered my opinion a bit. I thought when a track was playing that the background was simply a blurred out solid color with large text about the track overlaid on top of it. In reality the album art is behind the text, it's full screen and blurred out. That makes it a little better now that I realize that thanks to my son.
8. Occasionally the home button to the lower left is just plain missing, no idea on that one.
9. When selecting the artists tab it shows you about 10 artists and then when you hit the right down arrow no more artists are shown and Siri asks if she can help you. Why can't I continue to scroll through the artists?
These atrocities can't be by design, can they? Maybe there's some settings or something I'm overlooking? I'm a huge Apple guy and this is the first time I have been underwhelmed by one of their products, much to my surprise and dismay. I've never seen such a poorly designed music navigation interface. What shocks me most is that it is actually just a mirroring of my iPhone yet some of the iPhone navigation of music is simply not present. For example If I click on an artist on my phone in the Music app it immediately brings me to a list of their albums. CarPlay DOES NOT work this way!
I'll post more in this thread as I experience different aspects of CarPlay. Hopefully it gets updated soon and addresses some of these issues. But at the moment it's not a great piece of software and I have no idea how this made it out of Apple's R&D lab with such glaring flaws!
I was very excited for CarPlay, in fact it was one of the reasons I waited to order the 2016 Stingray (instead of a 2015).
Here's some of my experiences so far:
1. It's an absolute disaster in CarPlay trying to view albums by a specific artist. I literally couldn't find a way to do this. If you click on albums you get a list of EVERY album by all artists on your phone in random order except the first few which seem to be the most recently played. If you click on an artist in the artists tab it immediately starts playing a song from that artist and then sequentially continues through every song from that artist. There is simply no way to list all albums by a particular artist! That is unbelievable, especially considering that I'm easily able to do it in Chevrolet MyLink. Does anyone know why this happens? Has it happened to you?
For example I selected the artist Meat Loaf. I have all of his albums on my iPhone including Bat Out Of Hell 1, 2, & 3. In the album list I selected Meat Loaf, a few of his albums were shown because I had recently played them but there was no way to load the rest. In particular I wanted to play Bat Out Of Hell II which wasn't listed and resulted in absolute insanity trying to get it to play. I figured I'd outsmart CarPlay and told Siri "play Meatloaf Bat Out Of Hell 2", every single time it went to the first song on Bat Out Of Hell 1. So then I changed the Siri command to "Play Bat Out Of Hell T W O". I spelled out the number 2. Her response? "Now playing Bat Out Of Hell 3!!!!" It consistently did this every time. In the end I never got Bat Out Of Hell 2 to play but it did ultimately give me a laugh.
2. When selecting the artists tab sometimes I am presented with a very convenient A-Z list between the up and down arrows on the right where I can jump to artists that start with a specific letter, very handy. The problem is that at least 90% of the time the artists tab does not offer me this option. There's no rhyme or reason as to why it appears only occasionally that I can discern.
3. There's no way to disable CarPlay if I want to exclusively use the MyLink system built into the car, which I am really considering.
4. I experienced a very loud shriek for lack of a better term twice during a song on iTunes Radio.
5. Even though I didn't select CarPlay on the screen a text message that came in popped up on the screen with a CarPlay notification.
6. Siri works really well most of the time when requesting specific music to be played. It'll find a track by name even if the artist isn't spoken. I did have one comical situation where Siri simply crashed and burned, see #1 above.
7. The interface is not the most visually stimulating, it's kind of on the boring side of things. But my son pointed something out to me that altered my opinion a bit. I thought when a track was playing that the background was simply a blurred out solid color with large text about the track overlaid on top of it. In reality the album art is behind the text, it's full screen and blurred out. That makes it a little better now that I realize that thanks to my son.
8. Occasionally the home button to the lower left is just plain missing, no idea on that one.
9. When selecting the artists tab it shows you about 10 artists and then when you hit the right down arrow no more artists are shown and Siri asks if she can help you. Why can't I continue to scroll through the artists?
These atrocities can't be by design, can they? Maybe there's some settings or something I'm overlooking? I'm a huge Apple guy and this is the first time I have been underwhelmed by one of their products, much to my surprise and dismay. I've never seen such a poorly designed music navigation interface. What shocks me most is that it is actually just a mirroring of my iPhone yet some of the iPhone navigation of music is simply not present. For example If I click on an artist on my phone in the Music app it immediately brings me to a list of their albums. CarPlay DOES NOT work this way!
I'll post more in this thread as I experience different aspects of CarPlay. Hopefully it gets updated soon and addresses some of these issues. But at the moment it's not a great piece of software and I have no idea how this made it out of Apple's R&D lab with such glaring flaws!
