Alpine Headunit USB "Reading Error".

Necrodox

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Jun 13, 2013
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What's up guys, I got my Galaxy S4 yesterday and am a brand new Android user moving away from iOS. For the most part I am happy about the features but one of my biggest pet peeves as of now is the fact that I cannot connect my S4 to my Alpine headunit without receiving a "reading error". My previous iPhone 4 didn't have any issues in this area and I'm not entirely sure how to tackle this problem.

Does anyone know of a solution for this problem? Thanks in advance!
 

chrishoyt2013

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May 29, 2013
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Most head units can't read via USB with android phones. Either Aux or Bluetooth will work. I have a Pioneer head unit in my car and it does the same thing. It will charge..but nothing else. Seem head unit manufacturers figured everyone has I phones..that and iTunes haha...sorry man.

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Necrodox

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Well that's really stupid. There has to be some sort of alternative for this problem I can't believe someone hasn't tackled or considered this issue. I'm still snooping around to find a solution and if I come across one I'll surely post it here. In the mean time if anyone has any relevant information that may aid the process feel free to chime in.

Thanks again.
 

paintdrinkingpete

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Dec 12, 2009
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Android no longer supports "Mass Storage" mode over USB, but rather use MTP instead.

MTP is a fairly universal media transfer protocol used by many devices (i.e. digital cameras), but your car stereo most likely only recognizes USB devices in mass storage mode, similar to what a standard USB flash drive uses. (For what it's worth, I'm not sure if iPhones support mass storage mode either, but it's highly likely that many car stereos have builtin support for iPhone's proprietary protocols so it doesn't matter).

There are actually a lot of good reasons why Android no longer supports mass storage mode, which I don't think I feel like getting into here. A lot of folks complained when Google dropped support for mass storage mode and switched to MTP when ICS was released, but frankly if you actually look into the issue, it's fairly easy to see why supporting mass storage mode is more of a logistical nightmare with today's high capacity devices. (A big part of it is that in order to present a drive or partition to another device in mass storage mode, it has be unmounted from the device itself, which obviously creates a ton of problems if your phone can no longer access the internal storage partition while it's hooked up to your car/computer/whatever).

Long story short? You're most likely not going to find a "solution" to this specific problem.

Hopefully, now that MTP has been standard on all Android devices, more car stereo (and other product) manufacturers will start to provide support for it. Until then, you're probably stuck using AUX or BT. For me, BT works awesome, but if your head unit doesn't support that either, I can see why it would be frustrating.

EDIT: Here's a reddit post on this issue that describes a lot of the reasons why mass storage mode is no longer supported...
http://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/1aqjd0/why_do_new_versions_of_android_not_support_usb/
 

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