So far I have downloaded 140 CDs into the Music Box. Looks like my 2010 sedan will hold about 200 CDs and 2500 songs.

I have created 2 playlists. One of them has 350 songs on it, the other less. I'm wondering if there's a limit to the number of songs on a playlist? Anyway, each of these playlists is like having an IPod Shuffle. Pretty cool.

Most of my CDs are from the 80s and 90s. The hard drive has failed to recognize 2 of my CDs so far (The Peregrins and Alex Chilton), which are cataloged under "NO ARTIST" in the Artist list.

I guess I have a bootleg copy of a Lenny Kravitz album because all the song titles are in German.

The only other quirk is a problem with albums entitled "Greatest Hits". So far I have downloaded 4 - The Doors, The Byrds, The Fixx, and Tom Petty. The Music Box can't open just one of these CDs. When I select The Doors Greatest Hits album, I get all 53 songs from all 4 albums.

And the songs alternate. Song 1 from the Doors CD followed by Song 1 from the Byrds followed by Song 1 from the Fixx followed by Song 1 from Tom Petty followed by Song 2 from the Doors, etc.

 

niiiiiice man, my music box is empty

the thing i hate about it is, to upload the songs to the hard drive the CD should be burn as "Audio CD" which you can only fit max 18 songs only and i have like 1500+ songs.

if ONLY they made it easier on us lolz, like MP3 cd, you can fit 300+ song in 1 cd.

 

I wish it has the option to copy MP3 disc to the HDD.

 

Maybe you should go into the Music Box->menu and "edit albums" and manually change the album titles of the ones giving you problems. If they all have slightly different names (like Doors Greatest Hits instead of just Greatest Hits) this might help.

Also you can manually add the names of the ones it didn't recognize that way. Also, every once in a while, especially if you get new recently-released CDs, you'll want to update the database of song names from here:
Infiniti Music Box | Updates from Gracenote | Infiniti USA

 

Thanks for the tips!

 

Yeah, I was excited it had the MusicBox, but if I can't put MP3s on there, it's useless to me. I don't want to have to burn 100 CDs just to get them all on there.

Bluetooth streaming is pretty cool, except for the periodic dropouts. I usually just go through my iPhone/iPod and the USB.

 

I bought a 4GB Compact Flash today and it works really well.
I'll buy:
-Compact Flash to USB reader.
http://cgi.ebay.com/23-IN-1-USB-2-0-...item45f2d7d87f
-SD to Compact Flash adapter
http://cgi.ebay.com/SDHC-SD-MMC-COMP...item3effb335d2
-16GB SDHC card.
Newegg.com - Patriot 16GB Secure Digital High-Capacity (SDHC) Flash Card Model PSF16GSDHC6

or

16GB Compact Flash
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820161368

So 16GB for $60 total is not bad. And it's super easy to download music to the car. I rather buy the first setup because it will be cheap to upgrade to 32GB later on and I can reuse the 16GB SDHC.

 

Remember that the Compact Flash interface was eliminated for the 2010 model in favor of a USB interface...

 

I know that I can burn my MP3s to AudioCD, then rip them to my Music Box. And I know that I can manually edit the ID3 tag info through Music Box -> Settings -> Edit, for those tracks that GraceNote won't find. The problem is that I have approximately 4000 tracks, and most of the good ones (that I'd transfer to my vehicle) are custom DJ music mixes; i.e. no GraceNote/CDDB info exists for them. Can you imagine manually entering MP3 info for 100s of custom music mixes?

I decided to sacrifice my awesome DJ mixes, and I started burning some of my "commercial" albums back to Audio CD (originals have walked with family, friends, etc), but GraceNote doesn't get all of them. I tried setting the CD-TEXT priority, but the ripper still doesn't seem to get it right, consistently.

I tried copying tracks to a DVD, but that only holds about 4GB, so I have to fumble through DVDs to find the tracks I want to play. I then solved that problem by copying about 26GB of tracks (only a portion of my music) to a 32GB flash drive. However, neither option offer the ability to play by album, artist, genre, etc.

Playing my iPhone 3GS over Bluetooth works, with the occasional dropouts, as LSUtigerME mentions. Since I like to navigate through my music, Bluetooth is almost useless, because I can't control the music selection (no track up/down, etc). I'd have to navigate through music on my iPhone, but that's a little more difficult to do, while driving.

The one option that does work well is plugging the iPhone in to the USB port. That provides the ability to sort by artist, album, genre, etc, and it allows me to navigate through my music; however, I only have a 16GB iPhone, and it's a pain in the @55 to keep fumbling with the cable.

I love my car; it is an awesome, fun ride, but I can't believe that such basic functionality as uploading MP3s is missing! I've seen much less expensive vehicles that have nailed this fundamental feature. So, where does that leave me?

Does anyone know of any Music Box hacks that will allow us upload music directly to the Music Box HDD?

 

No, there doesn't seem to be any other way to get songs on the box, unfortunately.

The best system I had was using my 5th gen 30GB ipod (classic not touch) and leaving it in the car almost all of the time. But that recently died on me, so I'm currently using my 8GB iPhone 3G, which only holds < 1/3rd of my music library after leaving room for apps and stuff. Also with my 2009 G the phone doesn't charge when plugged in. So the iPhone solution is far from perfect for me.

And I keep forgetting to plug it in or leave it in the car, as you said, fumbling with the cable.

So I'm going to sometime soon plunk down the money for a 7th-gen iPod classic 160GB, and mainly leave it in the car like I did with the old one except for when I need it for something else or want to futz with it on the computer.

 

Yeah, it's really frustrating, though, isn't it? I hate to beat a dead horse, but it drives me crazy to have a 9.3GB drive with just a handful of CDs on it, because I can't do a simple MP3 upload from my laptop, iPhone or even flash drive. Arrrggghhh

I absolutely love the driving experience, but I won't lease another Infiniti until they fix the iPhone addressbook corruption issue (search the Bluetooth threads) and enhance the MP3 featureset to include direct uploads.

 

I've found that the best solution is to just burn all of your MP3's to a CD-RW (album by album). It's really time consuming, but at least you get to have all your music stored on the Music Box.

The only problem I've encountered so far is that once an album finishes recording to the Music Box, many of the tracks display a red circle with a slash through them. According to the manual, this means that the track didn't rip properly from the CD (even though they seem to play fine). I've tried re-recording the CD's that show this red circle, but it just reappears. Anyone have any ideas?

 

Ugh. No thanks.

Especially when I have around 1500 songs, and a large portion of them do not make a complete album. Which means I'd also need to manually type the data for all of those songs into the box. I'd spend $200 on a new iPod before i would do that.

The whole point of computers is to automate repetitive tasks like that. Having to do all of that work would make me about 1000x more resentful that Infiniti built a system that can play mp3s (via the CF or USB or MP3 CDs for example), contains a hard drive large enough to hold thousands of songs, yet lacks the basic functionality of simply transferring mp3s to that hard drive.

 

Yeah, I agree with SM_Shadowman. I'll be honest, because having my music is so critical to me, I did try burning my CDs. I must've wasted 50 CDs, and Gracenote didn't accurately get them all. There was no way I was going to try manually entering the tag info. I tried burning a couple of the hundreds of custom music mixes I own, with CD-TEXT, and [of course] the Music Box didn't pick up the tag info. Ugh, it's just a totally frustrating experience! So far, my 32GB flash drive has been working great. I just wish I could search by artist, album or genre...

 

I've noticed that when I set my 360 song playlist to "random", there seems to be no memory of what's been played from car trip to car trip. In other words, I've heard some of the songs on the playlist several times, and many of the songs not once.