Just updated to Sync 3.4 on my Ranger 2019

[Gizmokid2005]

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[DavidR]

I hear you. I'm one of the niche USB media listeners. Only time I browse is to remember what I even have on the drive. I doubt there will be much change to this though. The USB media browsing was always sort of exempted from the NHTSA rules until recently. If they wanted to add the alpha jump like phone contact browsing, they probably would have already. From a voice perspective, we're just pushing to the standard UI.

USB sticks may be becoming a niche, but I think many people still have their own music collections on phones. My guess is that the same browsing limitations will apply when sync3 accesses music that's on your phone, since it's also a USB device. I guess it will be interesting to see over time how many users come out of the woodwork due to being locked out of their music while driving.

Contact browsing is different in some ways. With contacts, you usually *do* remember the name of the contact. With a large music collection built up over time, many people won't remember everything that's on a 32+ GB stick, or even on their phone if that's where it is. I don't normally have to browse contacts (I usually know the exact contact name) so I'm not sure what alpha jump is or if it would be useful for music browsing where you don't remember what's on the stick.

I'm not sure how the NHTSA regulations are formulated in terms of whether it's visual distraction time or hand-off-the-wheel time, or some combination of both, but I thought of a few possible suggestions. One is that when there is a list being presented, you could hijack the forward/back buttons on the steering wheel so that they temporarily become scroll up and down buttons. This would allow scrolling longer lists without needing to remove a hand from the wheel to operate an LCD display. Alternatively, you could keep the voice VR active while the list is presented and allow the voice commands "up" and "down" to scroll through the list, which would also keep your hands on the wheel. Would either of those satisfy NHTSA requirements?

If USB users are truly a small and shrinking niche, maybe Ford will have no interest in making any changes at all to help address this. I hope that's not the case, though.

I have found a partial and kludgy work-around. The system will recognize up to two partitions on a USB stick (but not more than two for some reason), and it will present each partition as a separate source in the media player. That would let you at least divide a stick into two smaller virtual sticks, which might help keep the lists shorter and lock out less music while driving. With a stick plugged into each port, you could have up to 4 virtual sources. One thing Ford could do that could make this workaround more useful is to have the system recognize more than just two partitions on USB sticks to make it easier to divide and conquer.

Lastly, this change has caused me to lose far more than I have gained in going from sync 3.3 to 3.4. Is it possible to downgrade back to sync 3.3, even if I need to go to a dealer to do it?

 

[UofMEngineer]

USB sticks may be becoming a niche, but I think many people still have their own music collections on phones. My guess is that the same browsing limitations will apply when sync3 accesses music that's on your phone, since it's also a USB device. I guess it will be interesting to see over time how many users come out of the woodwork due to being locked out of their music while driving.

Contact browsing is different in some ways. With contacts, you usually *do* remember the name of the contact. With a large music collection built up over time, many people won't remember everything that's on a 32+ GB stick, or even on their phone if that's where it is. I don't normally have to browse contacts (I usually know the exact contact name) so I'm not sure what alpha jump is or if it would be useful for music browsing where you don't remember what's on the stick.

I'm not sure how the NHTSA regulations are formulated in terms of whether it's visual distraction time or hand-off-the-wheel time, or some combination of both, but I thought of a few possible suggestions. One is that when there is a list being presented, you could hijack the forward/back buttons on the steering wheel so that they temporarily become scroll up and down buttons. This would allow scrolling longer lists without needing to remove a hand from the wheel to operate an LCD display. Alternatively, you could keep the voice VR active while the list is presented and allow the voice commands "up" and "down" to scroll through the list, which would also keep your hands on the wheel. Would either of those satisfy NHTSA requirements?

If USB users are truly a small and shrinking niche, maybe Ford will have no interest in making any changes at all to help address this. I hope that's not the case, though.

I have found a partial and kludgy work-around. The system will recognize up to two partitions on a USB stick (but not more than two for some reason), and it will present each partition as a separate source in the media player. That would let you at least divide a stick into two smaller virtual sticks, which might help keep the lists shorter and lock out less music while driving. With a stick plugged into each port, you could have up to 4 virtual sources. One thing Ford could do that could make this workaround more useful is to have the system recognize more than just two partitions on USB sticks to make it easier to divide and conquer.

Lastly, this change has caused me to lose far more than I have gained in going from sync 3.3 to 3.4. Is it possible to downgrade back to sync 3.3, even if I need to go to a dealer to do it?

USB media, whether stick or phone, is becoming less common with the streaming services. We're a rare breed anymore.

RE: Keeping VR active - We generally fall under the same rules. They may differ a little, but the same problem will still be there even if it was voice enabled.

RE: Work-around. That'll sort of work to the extent you've seen. Remember though, there is only 1 media device active to the system at a time. So, if you want to browse UI or VR, you can only browse the one currently / last sourced.

RE: Rolling back - You would need to get the matching 3.3.19052 voice and apps packages. I haven't tried it with a proper production updater though.

 

[DakotaGuy]

Thank you for confirming! I didn't get the .xml file to upload back to Ford (to tell them the upgrade was successful), but last time I tried to do it, it never worked anyway, so I'm not going to sweat that at all.

I didn’t get the .xml file either, however after I updated I connected my Ranger to my home WiFi and did the “Check for updates” and after it worked awhile it told me in the truck my software was up to date. When I later checked on the Ford website it also shows the newest 3.4 version running on my vehicle.

It does appear that they fixed Wi-Fi at least on mine because with 3.3 it didn’t seem to communicate with Ford. Hopefully going forward at least small maintenance updates can just be pushed via WiF. We’ll see.

 

[UofMEngineer]

I didn’t get the .xml file either, however after I updated I connected my Ranger to my home WiFi and did the “Check for updates” and after it worked awhile it told me in the truck my software was up to date. When I later checked on the Ford website it also shows the newest 3.4 version running on my vehicle.

It does appear that they fixed Wi-Fi at least on mine because with 3.3 it didn’t seem to communicate with Ford. Hopefully going forward at least small maintenance updates can just be pushed via WiF. We’ll see.

The v3.4 update *should* be available OTA now. I believe they may also have switched on map updates OTA as well. Not sure what the limitations on it are though.

 

[DavidR]

USB media, whether stick or phone, is becoming less common with the streaming services. We're a rare breed anymore.

RE: Keeping VR active - We generally fall under the same rules. They may differ a little, but the same problem will still be there even if it was voice enabled.

RE: Work-around. That'll sort of work to the extent you've seen. Remember though, there is only 1 media device active to the system at a time. So, if you want to browse UI or VR, you can only browse the one currently / last sourced.

RE: Rolling back - You would need to get the matching 3.3.19052 voice and apps packages. I haven't tried it with a proper production updater though.

You might be right. In a few years, having your own music library might be limited to audiophiles and us olds with hundreds of CDs. I don't think people with personal music libraries will disappear completely, but hopefully there will still be enough of it to warrant being supported by auto entertainment systems

Anyway, I played around a little more and have an update. I figured out what alpha jump is and guess what - it is there in the album browser once the voice control brings it up (I think Ford officially calls it "A-Z Jump"). Due to that, I think the system is usable, albeit with a number of extra screen taps, which somehow seems more distracting than a longer list (up to a point). The limit of a scrolling list seems to be 10 items, so as long as you have less than 10 albums each that start with any given letter, you should be able to see everything even while driving. Super large libraries on a single partition might still have a problem with the 10-item limit, but at that point maybe you just have to divide it up into a few separate sticks or partitions. Yes, they will be different sources to the system but that's fine as long as all of the music is available. You just wouldn't be able to shuffle-play across them.

My hunch is that the goal of the NHTSA regs might be that more screen taps is okay as long as it breaks up the screen attention period into shorter bursts of time between which you'll naturally tend to glance up and look at the road for a second or two.

 

[UofMEngineer]

You might be right. In a few years, having your own music library might be limited to audiophiles and us olds with hundreds of CDs. I don't think people with personal music libraries will disappear completely, but hopefully there will still be enough of it to warrant being supported by auto entertainment systems

Anyway, I played around a little more and have an update. I figured out what alpha jump is and guess what - it is there in the album browser once the voice control brings it up (I think Ford officially calls it "A-Z Jump"). Due to that, I think the system is usable, albeit with a number of extra screen taps, which somehow seems more distracting than a longer list (up to a point). The limit of a scrolling list seems to be 10 items, so as long as you have less than 10 albums each that start with any given letter, you should be able to see everything even while driving. Super large libraries on a single partition might still have a problem with the 10-item limit, but at that point maybe you just have to divide it up into a few separate sticks or partitions. Yes, they will be different sources to the system but that's fine as long as all of the music is available. You just wouldn't be able to shuffle-play across them.

My hunch is that the goal of the NHTSA regs might be that more screen taps is okay as long as it breaks up the screen attention period into shorter bursts of time between which you'll naturally tend to glance up and look at the road for a second or two.

Yeah, the alpha sort button isn't terribly obvious from the icon. It's usually broken down into the number of pages viewed, or touch tasks if I remember correctly. If you have a massive database, then you'll still hit the lockout on longer lists like Artist or Playlists, but it's workable for the most part.

 

[DavidR]

Yeah, the alpha sort button isn't terribly obvious from the icon. It's usually broken down into the number of pages viewed, or touch tasks if I remember correctly. If you have a massive database, then you'll still hit the lockout on longer lists like Artist or Playlists, but it's workable for the most part.

Yeah, it's definitely at least manageable now with the alpha-jump browser. I think over time it will end up not seeming much worse. I'm no longer thinking about downgrading, since in most other aspects, I like 3.4 a little better than 3.3, with the possible exception of the fact that more screen real estate now seems to be taken up with larger fonts and bigger white space margins around those fonts, which has made the home-screen map tile noticeably smaller.

 

[RedlandRanger]

I didn’t get the .xml file either, however after I updated I connected my Ranger to my home WiFi and did the “Check for updates” and after it worked awhile it told me in the truck my software was up to date. When I later checked on the Ford website it also shows the newest 3.4 version running on my vehicle.

It does appear that they fixed Wi-Fi at least on mine because with 3.3 it didn’t seem to communicate with Ford. Hopefully going forward at least small maintenance updates can just be pushed via WiF. We’ll see.

Interesting. I did end up finding the .xml file (I was looking in the wrong folder) - I uploaded it to Ford, which said it worked, but today when I did the check for updates it still thinks I'm on an older version. I'm giving up on that now.

 

[Ace Holliday]

Interesting. I did end up finding the .xml file (I was looking in the wrong folder) - I uploaded it to Ford, which said it worked, but today when I did the check for updates it still thinks I'm on an older version. I'm giving up on that now.

Give it a few days. Mine showed 3.3 for a week or so after the upgrade. It now correctly shows 3.4.

 

[RedlandRanger]

Give it a few days. Mine showed 3.3 for a week or so after the upgrade. It now correctly shows 3.4.

If it takes a week to update that is just pathetic. In this day and age, overnight would be bad enough (some sort of overnight batch process), but if it actually takes a week to update whatever database they have that would be really, really, sad. It has been at least a couple of days since I uploaded the xml file.

I'm liking Sync, but man, the supporting stuff is really, really bad.....

 

[DakotaGuy]

Interesting. I did end up finding the .xml file (I was looking in the wrong folder) - I uploaded it to Ford, which said it worked, but today when I did the check for updates it still thinks I'm on an older version. I'm giving up on that now.

Did you try connecting your truck to WiFi and checking on there? That’s how I got mine to report to Ford I have 3.4 installed. If you uploaded it probably will show up soon as well.

 

[Ace Holliday]

If it takes a week to update that is just pathetic. In this day and age, overnight would be bad enough (some sort of overnight batch process), but if it actually takes a week to update whatever database they have that would be really, really, sad. It has been at least a couple of days since I uploaded the xml file.

I'm liking Sync, but man, the supporting stuff is really, really bad.....

I do not disagree.

 

[RedlandRanger]

Did you try connecting your truck to WiFi and checking on there? That’s how I got mine to report to Ford I have 3.4 installed. If you uploaded it probably will show up soon as well.

I have it hooked to my home wifi and it should have been able to update if it wanted to. I didn't do a "check for updates" though. I might try that tonight just to see what happens.

 

[DakotaGuy]

I have it hooked to my home wifi and it should have been able to update if it wanted to. I didn't do a "check for updates" though. I might try that tonight just to see what happens.

Give it a try. It should tell you you’re on the latest version in the truck and when you login to the Ford site it should tell you you’re up to date. Should is the keyword.

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