MG4 Depreciation

Well, I don't care about a slight vibration at 70 mph. I don't tell you that you shouldn't care though, that not vibrating at 70 is old hat and all the cool kids like that vibration so suck it up, do I?
 
You're worrying about getting your music to play in the right order on an USB stick, I can't even find anywhere to slot my music in.

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I know it is a pain that technology keeps changing and methods that are tried and tested then have to be changed, requiring figuring it out all over again and finding a new solution.

I am hoping that soon we will all have a digital assistant to take care of such changes.

In the meantime, I look upon it as a mental challenge to keep the grey matter going.
 
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To be fair, all my Hyundai i10s played music of USB sticks, but the folder/filename/etc. stuff was a mess. Never tried it on my Peugeot, but wouldn't be surprised if it was also a bit off.

Someone could probably write a script to rename thousands of MP3s non-interactively.
 
Rolfe said:
Look, right now I'm more interested in getting it up and running, since my old Motorola precipitated this by dying on the job on Saturday. It clearly doesn't like Ionity either. Two different phone shops have pronounced that they can't get anything off the old phone because the screen has gone. So hello, square one.

Once I actually have the new phone taking calls made to the number I have had since 1993 rather than the temporary stop-gap number (long story), and got back in text contact with the people I really really need to be in touch with right now, and re-installed all my apps and found my way into its settings and figured out how its browser works etc etc, I might have time for additional functions.
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If It's a Samsung A series some of them cannot do NFC, so you wont be able to use anything requiring NFC. i.e. chargers and charging apps
 
Ian Key said:
You're worrying about getting your music to play in the right order on an USB stick, I can't even find anywhere to slot my music in.

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What the hell is that?

tsedge said:
I know it is a pain that technology keeps changing and methods that are tried and tested then have to be changed, requiring figuring it out all over again and finding a new solution.

I am hoping that soon we will all have a digital assistant to take care of such changes.

In the meantime, I look upon it as a mental challenge to keep the grey matter going.
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I don't mind technology changing. I've gone through LPs, cassette tape, CDs, iPods, USB sticks, not to mention AM radio to FM and now DAB, and Betamax to DVD (skipping over the horror that was VHS) to internet streaming.

Usually though, one hopes that advances in technology will be improvements on what went before. Most of these innovations were greeted by me with glad cries of joy, sometimes because they gave better quality, but often because they improved my listening experience, usually by making it more convenient and taking the hassle out of playing music. This is frankly a mess. The world is full of people of a certain age who just want to shove a CD (or even a tape!) in the car and drive off to the music. We're getting to the point where you practically need an advanced degree in IT to do anything more than listen to the radio.

The MG4 does indeed have the capability to "just play the music" albeit with a little bit if fiddling. In the SE this is however crippled by this stupid bug that doesn't allow it to recognise folders. I really don't think it's unreasonable to expect this to be rectified, without being lectured about progress.

It was really nice, back in 1993, to get a car with the ability to play what I wanted to listen to, rather than just accept the radio programming. Hello, square one.

Chequers said:
If It's a Samsung A series some of them cannot do NFC, so you wont be able to use anything requiring NFC. i.e. chargers and charging apps
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Hmm. It's a Samsung A34. If this is a problem I need to get it sorted out during the cooling-off period, i.e. soon. Please could you explain further? I don't actually know what NFC is. My old Motorola that was so simple-minded that it didn't support Android Auto coped fine with chargers and charging apps.
 
Rolfe said:
To be fair, MG gives us the capability, so they might as well make it work. If you want to listen to the radio and nothing else, or rely on your phone and a streaming service and Bluetooth, carry on. Nobody is preventing you. I want to listen to very specific things that are not available by these methods.

If there was another way to listen to the things I want to listen to, and have been able to listen to in the car for the past 25 years one way or another, fine. But there isn't. It's not much of an advance to say tough, the cool kids don't want to do that any more. The car I bought has a feature that should let me do what I want to do, and that feature doesn't work properly. That the cool kids may not want to use it is not really an excuse.
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This may not help you, but we find just loading the phone with our CD collection and using it rather than a USB stick works pretty well.
An alternative would be to nip onto the online purveyor of tat of your choice and buy a job-lot of relatively small USB sticks for next to nothing. Organise your music per stick - Caliban even has two large boxes for the sticks right next to you. This is no different to the way we used to use cassettes back in the day, or CDs latterly.
Yes, I'm suggesting routing around the issue, but I can't think of many consumer technologies for which, in use and often for our particular use cases, we don't adapt the way we do things. We just get used to the adaptation really quickly and normalise it.
Saying that, we all have that One Thing about cars or other things in our lives that just get right up our noses, while others shrug and wonder what all the fuss is about. (Except me, of course. My bugbears are all perfectly reasonable and valid...!)
 
Proper answer is to import your usb stick music into your pc, connect phone and sync music. Then plug your phone into car via cable and use android auto for music instead of your USB (you can use BT if you dont like android auto).
Hopefully you have already imported all your contacts etc via google. If not I think you can use samsung smart switch via cable connected to your old phone to sync any info you are missing (i think even if you cannot see the screen on your old phone). You could pop into a samsung shop when you are down Saff (or Edinburgh if you are back up North) and ask them to do?
 
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QLeo said:
This may not help you, but we find just loading the phone with our CD collection and using it rather than a USB stick works pretty well.
An alternative would be to nip onto the online purveyor of tat of your choice and buy a job-lot of relatively small USB sticks for next to nothing. Organise your music per stick - Caliban even has two large boxes for the sticks right next to you. This is no different to the way we used to use cassettes back in the day, or CDs latterly.
Yes, I'm suggesting routing around the issue, but I can't think of many consumer technologies for which, in use and often for our particular use cases, we don't adapt the way we do things. We just get used to the adaptation really quickly and normalise it.
Saying that, we all have that One Thing about cars or other things in our lives that just get right up our noses, while others shrug and wonder what all the fuss is about. (Except me, of course. My bugbears are all perfectly reasonable and valid...!)
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Oh, I've done a work-round and continue to add to it, but it's a pain, and a pain that would go away if MG would simply fix the bug.

I don't think it's unreasonable to believe that a feature MG has incorporated into the car should actually work, and repeatedly being told that I shouldn't want it to work and it was silly of MG even to include it in the first place isn't helping.

Robf said:
Proper answer is to import your usb stick music into your pc, connect phone and sync music. Then plug your phone into car via cable and use android auto for music instead of your USB.
Hopefully you have already imported all your contacts etc via google. If not I think you can use samsung smart switch via cable connected to your old phone to sync any info you are missing (i think even if you cannot see the screen on your old phone). You could pop into a samsung shop when you are down Saff and ask them to do?
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Right at the moment I'm getting nowhere with this phone, because apparently my real number will take 24-48 hours and "perhaps up to a week" to be applied to the phone. I was advised I could put the old SIM card into the new phone and that would work, which sounded good, but I can't open the SIM card slot in the new phone, because the phone itself doesn't look like the picture in the manual. Even the guy on the Samsung helpdesk couldn't suss it out.

I may have to go back to the O2 shop which is 18 miles away (yes, I know, nothing to QLeo) and get this sorted out. Meanwhile I'm incommunicado. The idea of doing anything more with this phone beyond getting it to receive calls and texts seems like an impossible dream at the moment.

Then I have to start rebuilding all my contacts, as the dead screen means there's no way to transfer them from the old phone. Happy days.
 
Rolfe said:
Oh, I've done a work-round and continue to add to it, but it's a pain, and a pain that would go away if MG would simply fix the bug.

I don't think it's unreasonable to believe that a feature MG has incorporated into the car should actually work, and repeatedly being told that I shouldn't want it to work and it was silly of MG even to include it in the first place isn't helping.
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I got to wondering if there was a technical workaround, such as the choice of filesystem for the USB stick, and started a quick search. It seems MG are by no means alone in having limited options for USB music structures. But I'll try a couple of options and if there is any improvement, I'll report back
 
I wondered that myself, but couldn't see anything obvious. The interesting thing is that the car itself seems to create folders on the stick, which is a bit of a weird one if it can't support folders.

Two layers of folder support would fix everything. Apparently the Trophy has even more than that. It seems absolutely senseless, given that the feature in the Trophy works fine, that the SE version is essentially unusable.
 
QLeo said:
I got to wondering if there was a technical workaround, such as the choice of filesystem for the USB stick, and started a quick search. It seems MG are by no means alone in having limited options for USB music structures. But I'll try a couple of options and if there is any improvement, I'll report back
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I can't find a description of the folder structure MG expects.

But if you find one, explain it to ChatGPT, and ask for a Windows PowerShell script to rename the files, it'll produce one, and it'll probably work.
 
Rolfe said:
Right at the moment I'm getting nowhere with this phone, because apparently my real number will take 24-48 hours and "perhaps up to a week" to be applied to the phone. I was advised I could put the old SIM card into the new phone and that would work, which sounded good, but I can't open the SIM card slot in the new phone, because the phone itself doesn't look like the picture in the manual. Even the guy on the Samsung helpdesk couldn't suss it out.

I may have to go back to the O2 shop which is 18 miles away (yes, I know, nothing to QLeo) and get this sorted out. Meanwhile I'm incommunicado. The idea of doing anything more with this phone beyond getting it to receive calls and texts seems like an impossible dream at the moment.

Then I have to start rebuilding all my contacts, as the dead screen means there's no way to transfer them from the old phone. Happy days.
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Link below should help with SIM card


If you login to google (using your google login) on your new phone it should import all your contacts etc.
It is frustrating waiting for them to port your old number, even if its a planned new phone :(. But your old sim should still work
 
Regarding SIM card ... the A34 will take a nano SIM; your old phone may have been a micro SIM (although I don't think it's that old - nano SIMs have been in use for several years now).
 
Robf said:
Link below should help with SIM card


If you login to google (using your google login) on your new phone it should import all your contacts etc.
It is frustrating waiting for them to port your old number, even if its a planned new phone :(. But your old sim should still work
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Thanks. That phone in the video looks like the pictures in the manual. My actual phone doesn't. It doesn't have that slot at all. This is really, really weird. I may have to drive back to the shop after all.

I don't think the contacts thing is going to work. I have logged in with my Google account, but nothing happened. Of course, the phone currently has a different number. And I don't know that I ever logged into the old phone with my Google account. The girl in the shop just said it was impossible to transfer the information without being able to tap on the screen of the old phone.
 
siteguru said:
Is this your phone @Rolfe ?

Samsung Galaxy A34 - Full phone specifications

www.gsmarena.com www.gsmarena.com

(It says that it should support NFC - albeit market/region dependant. UK variants would normally include it).
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Hard to know, since it only shows the front. The top of my phone, which is indeed a Samsung Galaxy A34 5G both according to the box and according to the phone itself, doesn't look like the picture in the manual in the box. The phone in Robf's video does look like the manual.

What is NFC, anyway?
 

Are you enjoying your MG4?

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