Picked up a 250 AWD last week.. completely in love with the car. of the few minor gripes i do have, one of the biggest ones is the totally screwed up "random" functionality of the standard lexus audio system when playing CDs.

I'm sure most of you realize what I'm talking about.. when you skip tracks on a CD in random mode, it DOESNT skip randomly. it only randoms the next song when you let the current song play to completion. otherwise you have to disable the random and re-enable it. since the audio screen doesnt stick, that means you have to press AUDIO, then random, then random again for a whopping 3 button presses to randomly choose a track. since i primarily burn mp3 CDs.. not having this functionality is ridiculous.

is there any work around for this?

 

Not really... What i ended up doing is getting a free program I found on the internet (i believe its called ReNamer but im not home to check right now) that allows me to select a whole bunch of files and among other things assign random numbers to the beginning of the file name. This then resorts the files all randomized and when burned to a CD (is use CD-RW so I can always go back and add more music) will play in the car in random order... Thats the best I could find in my searching.

 

One workaround is to get an iPod adapter frome someone like Vaistech, heh heh... but obviously that might be a little too much $$$/trouble/time.

If you were to do that, though, the random function uses the iPod's built-in shuffle. So the whole playlist is randomized. But then again, in my experience, the ipod's shuffle function is absolutely terrible. Not nearly random enough.

 

thanks for the input guys. i DO have an iPod that i use for longer trips and commutes, but if im just driving the 10 minutes to work i might not feel like even taking it out of my pocket, which is why the mp3 CDs come in handy.

regarding the name randomizer, when i burn mp3 discs i actually create copies of the files in another location and use Tag&Rename to mass rename the files to just contain <song title>.mp3. this way it's semi-random (no particular order to song titles) but if i NEED to find a track, i can still find it cuz its in alpha order. plus.. the display looks all pretty when it just contains <song title>.mp3

its a shame.. whoever designed this clearly didn't feel like sticking to 20 year old precedent of how CD players should work. idiot.

 

Noticed the same thing on my 3 week old 250 w/ stock audio.

You've found the only workaround I've been able to find (Disable and re-enable the RAND function).

 

off topic but i can even seem to get MP3 to play on my ML? i had Bit Torren added to my computer and had a friend come over as i have never burrned CD's to MP3 format. i have always used the ipod for this stuff or i burned a generic cd to bring in the car. now i would like to use this and it doesnt seem to like the CD? we even tried to burn a Video of a song to see if i could get it to play on the DVD/Navi scredd and it just didnt like it???? i would like to download a CD and have music videos on it so that you can hear it but also watch it at certain times. i am never in the car long enough to enjoy this nice feature but when i travel it could come in handy!

 

Are you aware that there is a setting on the menu which allows the AUDIO (or whatever) screen to remain on, instead of automatically switching back to MAP? Might save you a button push or two.

 

I agree 100%. Complete bone head design.

 

no i was definitely not aware of that.. havent really had time to go through all the menu settings yet. which setting is this?

 

i just noticed today that in random mode, it only randomly selects a song after a track has been played completely from beginning to end. If you manually select the next track, the system will select the track right after like from 7 to 8. Hope that makes sense.

 

haha... umm. yeah... hence, the thread subject and initial post

 

as we believe there is no true human created random sequence, we will not offer a random feature that is actually random. its will be predictable and boring, like our culture.

-lexus

 

Press "INFO", then "Screen Setting", and then it's the first option on the screen. (turn it 'off')

 

I searched and found this 3 year old thread instead of making a new one so...

Has a work around for this problem been solved since then?? I want real random playback please.

 

None that I'm aware of. As you've probably already figured out from reading the posts above, pressing RAND twice is a workaround, or you can get an iPod integration kit. It was a stupid oversight on behalf of Lexus.