Comment by QuadmasterXLII
13 hours ago
My car plays "Africa" by toto every time I plug in the iphone to charge. It was a trifling inconvenience, then over years it became rage inducing, and now it's reached all the way back around to funny.
13 hours ago
My car plays "Africa" by toto every time I plug in the iphone to charge. It was a trifling inconvenience, then over years it became rage inducing, and now it's reached all the way back around to funny.
It's not the phone deciding to do it, when the device connects the car is telling it to play. Check your infotainment settings to see if there's a way to turn it off.
Apple doesn't have an official way to prevent it, but I think you could do it with Shortcuts and an automation to pause music triggered by "When CarPlay is connected."
If it's tricky to get it to trigger at the exact time it starts playing, you could even do like:
Yep. My old Honda Fit did this way before CarPlay. I believe it’s a holdover from external mp3 devices using track numbers in their filenames.
It was always a stupid decision to start playing your music alphabetically, but it became a more stupid decision when music libraries were no longer carefully curated folders in the filesystem.
MP3 player interfaces which were originally integrated via CD changer interfaces that start from the first track of the first disc and play tracks and discs sequentially unless shuffle is enabled, which is a pefectly sensible default for a CD changer.
Mine was A-Punk by Vampire Weekend. Used to annoy me to no end, but it turned out it was a "feature" of the car stereo to just default to playing alphabetically. Buying a new car fixes that little issue. Easy!
That's the song I'd get docking my iPod in my stereo like 15 years ago. Strong memories.
Add a custom song `AAAAAAA` that's just 60 minutes of silence?
Perhaps 60 seconds of silence and then the bass intro of Seven Nation Army kicking off at full volume.
I used to have a copy of the THX theater intro sound effect as the alphabetically first track in my library for this purpose. Not quite 60 seconds, but starts off quiet and served as a reminder to either choose a track or shut the music off.
Then after your hour long drive it happens? Great!
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Reminds me of one of my favorite all time HN posts: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32163667
It is getting increasingly hard not to think of my Androids that has never done anything like this. It just continues on exactly the location in the last played song or whatever else I was playing. Audio book, radio podcast, movie, whatever. It just picks up from where I was.
If I had to pick one tune to listen to every day, that wouldn’t be the worst one.
If there's anything I've learned from using my favorite tracks as a daily alarm: there is no music that I won't eventually start to hate :(
It's gotten to the point after 15 years that I've stopped trying, for fear of ruining even more good music.
I have noticed too that some people are more/less prone to this, which makes me wonder: is anyone completely immune? Are there people who, no matter how often they hear a song, will still love it?
Don't get me started with that U2 album I never purchased...
Buying a USB data blocker for your car fixes this issue.