[My] Primary issues with this device's iOS app's functionality

I wanted to brefily list the downfalls of the iOS app that is used as the interface for interacting with this device.

These bugs are basically what has caused me to abandon the device until such are fixed, so I hope SanDisk takes note of such:

  1. When playing music, iOS has no idea about it… something is not interfacing correctly in the code that your developers have used to output the music.

Issues include:

  • In the task controls App Switcher area it shows as no music playing, and hence no music control

  • Other applications can play music at the same time, causing a whole mess of audio

  • Car stereo systems usually attempt to always autoplay music when first plugged in, so when it “sees” that no music is playing and the instruction is given to start music, then the above condition occurs where 2 audio streams play (SanDisk’s app that is already playing, and the Podcasts or Music app which is started from the car stereo headunit.

  • Biggest of all: NO Metadata is displayed on any interface (like on my Car Stereo), due to it not being updated in iOS

Please have you developers refer to the following tutorials / help areas to fix this ASAP:

- iosdeveloperzone.com/2012/10/01/tutorial-playing-audio-with-avaudioplayer/

- sagorin.org/ios-playing-audio-in-background-audio/

- stackoverflow.com/questions/8467533/ios-sdk-playing-music-on-the-background-and-switching-views

  1. There is no preservation of previous settings or previous songs.

On an iPod, or in the Music app, it remembers such things as Shuffle enabled, last played song, etc, but when this iOS app exists, it has no recollection what-so-ever. Extremely frustrating to have to always re-enable settings, and lose the last played shuffle history, to simply start over and listen to songs that can be played yet again.

  1. PLEASE provide an option, clickable list item, or simply an icon next to play Recursively (view in subfolders).

I really (and I mean very much) hate the fact that when I select a song to play, and then select shuffle, that it ONLY shuffles the songs in the CURRENT FOLDER. No other songs in any subfolder are touched, and the “music stream” simply ends because it thinks that no more files exist. I organize my music by generes and subcategories to represent playlists. To have to maintain a linear list and a copy every song with subfolders being banned is beyond frustrating. The shuffle feature needs to create a random ordered list of all songs from the current folder and all sub folders, IF that option (to [hopefully] be added) specified. That is not hard, and this is an extreme oversight to not have such a feature like this.

I have another thread on these forums here with some feature requests, but I am hoping that these problems are fixed ASAP. I couldn’t have been more disappointed that an app update was released within the past week and did not address any of these. SankDisk were you not aware of at least the iOS playing status issue with updating the Metadata / audio stream, to have it play audio properly like every other App Store application out there?

I have given up on this device for now until I see some directions towards these 3 problematic and headache inducing issues. About ready to purchase a used iPod and call it done, while returning this to Amazon… But I want to provide SanDisk with the benefit of the doubt, and if some confirmation would be given that these features are either (a) currently being worked on and/or (b) they will look into these matters…

then I will probably just continue to wait.

Until then I will continue to be an unhappy customer whom wants to love and recommend this device to others.

For $100 per 64GB device, I may have just expected more… then again the device seems to work fine (minus its slow statup for wifi), but its the team that write the iOS app that I am cursing at (mentally).

Here’s to hoping that something gets done about these.

Best regards.

Hi AltF4,

I am sorry to hear about experience. I work in the product management team here at SanDisk Connect. I am aware of your comments, specifically comment #1. In the last few months, we had to prioritize the app to support iOS 7 and now we are working hard to improve other experiences (such as music streaming) in upcoming releases. We have some exciting things lined-up in the coming months that we feel will improve the experience of using our products, than what it is already. 

I would be happy to speak to you over the phone or in-person (if you are local to Bay Area) and would like your feedback. Your feedback to improve our product is greatly appreciated. 

You can contact me via wmd@sandisk.com

Thank you. 

MediaDrive-Pro

Thank you for taking the time to write me back. I am that much happier to hear a reply. I am very use to companies like Sony and Kingston to ignore any customers emails or forums, so this is groundbreaking support already, and thank you. 

I couldn’t be more glad to hear that you are aware of that issue (#1) already, as it was pretty obvious. Certainly understandable in regards to higher priorities like iOS 7 users because compatibility is king.

I hope you are able to relay this information I posted to the dev team there, to hopefully in the future have implementations towards these items, as it would finally make the product usable for my needs again (and I am sure thousands of others).

I will email you as well. That is exceptional support with you guys being so open here, but I was worried as I haven’t come across another post like yourself in this small area of the forum here. I will stick with your company and products whenever possible because of this. It makes all the difference. So thank you!

Best regards.