https://imgur.com/a/KHc3vV9I borrowed a newish, probably 2021, Toyota Camry yesterday. On the bottom of the giant screen that cool new cars have was a blast from my past: a tiny logo for a company called Gracenote. I hadnโt thought about them in more than a decade, but oh, what drama they created among nerds ripping CDs in the late 1990s.
The Dark Ages
In days of yore, the early 1990s, we did not stream our music on demand; we didn't have pervasive wireless internet access. We didn't even buy our music as digital downloads. We had to walk uphill, both ways, to purchase metal that someone had pounded dents into. Microscope dents on aluminum suspended in plastic that we spun around hundreds of times per second. This primitive technology was known as "compact discs" or "CDs".
While an improvement over preceding technologies of rust covered plastic film or dents in vinyl, CDs were still limited. In particular, there was no "metadata": information about the music. Metadata includes stuff like the artist, the title of the album, the names of the songs, the year of release, and the genre. The label printed on the CD would usually tell you the artist and album title. If you still had the case it came in, that would probably have the rest of the information. But none of it was computer friendly, you had to read it with your eyes! Your poor CD player could only say โTrack 01โ because thatโs all it knew.
Also, if you wanted to pick from lots of different albums, you needed to swap CDs, or get a multi-disc CD player, which was expensive and large.
Truly, they were hard times.
But we were on the cusp of a renaissance! In the mid-1990s, the forward thinking realized that the future was storing music as files one could copy around. Mind you, portable MP3 players were still years away, but you could keep dozens of albums on your computer to play on the (likely crap) speakers attached to it. So โrippingโ was invented to extract the music from the CD and place it onto a computer's "hard disk" (a spinning piece of metal covered in rust). As "hard disks" were quite small and music quite large, so you might only be able to hold a few albums. To solve this, we compressed the music so it would be smaller. With 1995โs release of WinPlay3 MP3 became the rising star in audio compression. (Ironically, MP3 was originally intended to be used for audio in a video file. Its
... keep reading on reddit โกHey guys, I need your help.
If you have either a '21 Mazda 3 or mazda 3 hatch or the '21 CX-30, all of which seem to use the same exact infotainment system, and you have no issues getting the correct album art to display on the screen when connected via bluetooth; Would you be able to do me a huge favor and tell me what the system firmware and the gracenote software versions that are installed in your car is?
If you're curious, here is why I need this information...
2 months ago I picked up a Mazda 3 hatch turbo premium. I test drove a '21 3 hatch turbo at first and a week or so later the premium trim that I later bought at another dealer in my preferred color that they had in stock. Both of the initial 2 cars that I drove, I was able to connect to the infotainment system and have it work just as one would expect. No issues. I was playing some recently released DnB and all art/artist info was displayed properly.
After driving my car off the lot, the next day I noticed that gracenote or whatever software is in charge of it, is not displaying the album art for that exact song I used to test the audio quality in the 2 tested vehicles. Its just giving me generic genre art, and its wrong at that. I did some research and this seems to be a common problem, as one would expect from a 3rd party service that rarely gets updated. What makes no sense to me is why I can't disable it in the system settings and why it worked fine in the other 2 cars but not the one I bought. This brings us to now. I have my car at the dealer with a laundry list of things that needs fixing including rattles and other defects. They are telling me that everything is working as intended and that everything is up to date.
They also gave me a loaner CX-30 that seems to have the exact same issue with both the album art, and the rattles (lol). So this is telling me that there was some update to either gracenote or the system itself between september and mid october that managed to mess things up. I'm hoping some kind person who is not experiencing this problem can tell me what software version their car is using so that I could relay that information to the dealer so that they could actually attempt to resolve this issue instead of doing the bare minimum and telling me that everything is fine when it isn't.
If you're in the Chicago area, I'll buy ya a beer!
Skaters Gonna Hate; Born to Be Mild
>A skate-off against Tony Hawk; Alexis learns the tough guy ropes from Carl.
The Bros in the Band; For the Record
> Bobby's dream of playing in a band might finally come true; Sameer tries to break a record.
I'm having this very stupid issue with my infotainment system in my 21 hatch and its driving me up a wall.
The system is not reading embedded images of the album art, and the gracenote function just pulls up generic genre images, most of which are wrong. There is a setting to not use the database in the system settings but it doesn't seem to change a damn thing. This wasn't an issue on the two identical vehicles I drove before pulling the trigger on this one ( for its color). I just had the dealer check it and it was just a bunch of shrugged shoulders.
Showed them what I was talking about in person on various players and streaming services, but they had no solution.
Anyone else out there experience something like this? We're you able to find a fix?
I'm working on loosening up my hands. My left hand is doing good and I can keep it pretty loose. However, my bottom hand still gets really stressed and my D gracenotes are suffering. It is mainly in the meaty part of my hand, near the thumb where it gets tense. My thumb placement is maybe a tad high, but not above my pointer finger. I've been trying some stretches as well taking my thumb off the chanter entirely as an exercise. Any advice?
I've had this problem for a month or so but ,with Covid and all that, haven't had the chance to ask anybody. It doesn't "squeal" when I'm playing any other note than B (except I think I heard it once when playing the E note normally but I'm not certain).
Overblowing could be the explanation, as I have a bit of a history with that, but if anyone has had a similar problem or knows what's going wrong please let me know, it'd be much appreciated.
I just bought my 2018 CX-5 GT yesterday, and I love it. My one tiny gripe is the terrible GraceNote system for music.. I don't understand why Mazda wouldn't just have the album art taken from the phone/ipod via bluetooth or USB itself?
I have a dedicated iPod that I ensure has all the album art and info filled out on it, so I was sad to find out that Mazda uses the GraceNote system and also sad to see no ones been able to modify it or add their own images/album art.
Its not the end of the world believe me, but I thought maybe there is a way to modify or have album art from the phone/ipod show instead and I just can't seem to find it in my searches..
So.. anyone?
