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emarsh7

Active Member
Jul 18, 2026
18
11
I brought a new Raval with the Sennheiser sound system a couple weeks ago. I own a 2018 Seat Ateca Xcellence with the premium sound system.

Currently I have about 13,300 tracks in my music collection. I've organized them in the file system as genre->artist->album the copied them to flash drives/sd cards.

I'm experiencing glitches when trying to listen to my collection on my new Raval. The biggest issue I'm experiencing is that about half the time I when I park the car and then I return to it later I find that it's forgotten what I was listening to. The media player also doesn't move onto the next album when the last track in the current album is completed. When that happens sometimes it goes back to the first track but ocassionally it will randomly jump to the middle of a different track. It seems to be more oriented towards playing single tracks than functioning as a full featured media player.

I have tried listening to my collection on Android Auto but when I do so the sound clarity suffers. I would buy a better media player on the Cupra Store if one were available but there is nothing. I don't mind spending a little more. I don't like not being offered the opportunity to do so. However I'm not onboard for subscribing to a streaming service.

I've reached out to Cupra about this. So far I've not received a reply. I noted that based on what I've found elsewhere online it looks like similar issues have been experienced by other users on other Cupra products and apparently their issues have not been addressed.

What's I find even more annoying is that my 2018 Seat Ateca Xcellence plays the same file system glitch free. My new car fails to do what my nine year old car has no problems with.

I would think that a product that targets the youth market would treat providing a premium musical experience as a priority.
 
We had a bit of a conversation about it over here :


Long start up time has been reported for Android Automotive Operating System (AAOS) which is the new Vag EV standard (2026 and after), Raval being the first Cupra to have it. On the ID dot models all the generic new models. Upto 60 seconds is suppose to be the wait time for restart. Software solution was reported on that thread but that's for the developer of the system, not end user. It shortens the wait for the music to restart. Forgetting where you were I didn't find like @emarsh7 but something to look out for. Might be nested directory trees or something like mib2 had limits. If you went over the limits it wouldn't tell you, just wouldn't play.

I did do an information thread on AAOS since this is all new and coming to ICE as well. The title isn't where the thread ended... beyond cartography but my initial interest.


It's really like having an Android system in the car, which it is but the Vag system is a closed system, using a curated Harman app library but is also your cars infotainment system which also offers integration to your car phone whether Android or iOS. Some integrate into the Google Playstore like Android TV or Play Games. This one is like your Amazon store, Android but outside Google store... if you follow to that. Links to what's in the Harman app library in @emarsh7 's one is shown on that link. I asked since the demo car in the UK had an empty store.
 
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I spent some time struggling to find the quality of sound that I ex[ected with the Sennhieser system and my music library. I was finally able to accomplish my goal but it's a bit of a hack.

My phone is a Moto G-86. The sound quality through Android Auto simply did not meet my expectations. I discovered that the sound is good on Bluetooth though. The problem is the Android Auto wifi connection. What I had to do is force the data transfer from wireless to wired. To do it I had to put Android Auto on my phone into Developer Mode by pressing the version ten times. Once in Developer Mode I disabled the wifi Android Auto connection.

The sound is good now but if I want Android Auto I have to plug my phone in with a cable. If all I want is my music I can use Bluetooth.

This is hardly perfect. If I use Bluetooth I have to choose my music on my phone.

Music on Android Auto has it's own problems. If I cable my phone in my car's infotainment display doesn't show me the folder hierarchy to the music that I'm currently listening too. So if I want to choose something different to listen to I have to start at the top level in the hierarchy of folders and drill down to that music.

Like I said, it is not perfect. I still think that excluding a proper media player was a stupid thing to do and it my cost VAG a sale the next time that I buy a new car. But at least it sounds good now.
 
Hmm well I did play music off a USB in the Raval doing the rounds as part of the sales push. I took my favourite Flac recording on usb C, plugged it in and we grooved along (sort of) with the dealer adjusting the immersion setting on the Sennheiser. Is it that you got to get all your music onto USB C rather than play it via a cable connection to the phone ?. Easy enough to do and use a small stud USB C. I bought a reversible USB A / C specially for the test.

One of these

SanDisk Ultra Dual Drive Go USB flash drive 64 GB USB Type-A / USB Type-C 3.2 Gen 1 (3.1 Gen 1) Black

£14 from Amazon.

On the mib2 standard / high I use 128gb SD cards.

If not bothered with a reversible dual stick you might find cheaper options. Since I moved totally to FLAC you need more meaty storage. That way you aren't playing compressed lossy music, just compressed in Flac with no loss. Possibly splash the cash and get a 512gb one if you got a very big music library and swap USBs as required.

EAC can be used to digitise any CD library to FLAC. I stuck to the trusty directory structure that others had used on the SeatCupra site historically. Music DVDs can be converted to FLAC. I had a large Minidisc library of live concert recordings so I converted them via the digital out into WAV files and then FLAC. That kept the reconstructed compressed mini disk recording. No loss from the minidisk compression 👍👌. That's approach I did with the DVDs. Audacity can be used if you have the will to track up these conversions. EACs obviously doesn't need that from a CD library.

Artist
Album

and an inserted cover.jpg of the album art 512x512 for the art.

Mib2 is a bit fussy for large album art files. You'd have to read what it said. The industry standard is that. Essentially historically it's a pretty standard media player structure implemented on all systems including the home. I got my library also plugged into the back of an Asus mesh with SanDisk 2tb passport drive. Kodi happily plays that. Nothing fancy plus a second copy that gets backed up.

Mib2 did place limits on how many files you could store in a directory. You wont reach those limits if you nest albums into artist. People came a cropper when they copied very large mp3 library that were all in one directory. It only saw the preset limit anything above that it ignored. That might be fixed in this incarnation. Only an mp3 issue and they may have fixed that. Check for small print in the Raval manual around formats it will play.
 
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Hmm well I did play music off a USB in the Raval doing the rounds as part of the sales push. I took my favourite Flac recording on usb C, plugged it in and we grooved along (sort of) with the dealer adjusting the immersion setting on the Sennheiser. Is it that you got to get all your music onto USB C rather than play it via a cable connection to the phone ?. Easy enough to do and use a small stud USB C. I bought a reversible USB A / C specially for the test.
I bought a premium 128gb usb C flash drive just for that purpose. That's when the problems began.

You can listen to music on a flash drive but it's not a proper media player. It's more of a track player. It doesn't have features one expects of a media player and doesn't even remember what track was being listened to after parking the car for a couple hours.
 
I bought a premium 128gb usb C flash drive just for that purpose. That's when the problems began.

You can listen to music on a flash drive but it's not a proper media player. It's more of a track player. It doesn't have features one expects of a media player and doesn't even remember what track was being listened to after parking the car for a couple hours.
I didn't push my test that far. Mib2 does remember what your last track was and restarts from the beginning... where the mutters come at this end if the music isn't tracked then a 45 minute recording has to be listened as far as you got up to, not if tracked. Just restart the track again and off. In your case more fumbling to find artist and album or if masses to mp3 in one place where you got upto ?. I could see that being tiresome. You get into a groove and want to pick the music up from where you got to.
 
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I didn't push my test that far. Mib2 does remember what your last track was and restarts from the beginning... where the mutters come at this end if the music isn't tracked then a 45 minute recording has to be listened as far as you got up to, not if tracked. Just restart the track again and off. In your case more fumbling to find artist and album or if masses to mp3 in one place where you got upto ?. I could see that being tiresome. You get into a groove and want to pick the music up from where you got to.
To me it's just kind of a no-brainer. My Ateca has a decent media player built into the dash and to me it's a basic expectation of a €35k car.

Incorporating a media player is easy enough. In fact a media player Audiowagon is available in the Google Playstore. Evidently Chinese brands have access to the Playstore but VAG has locked it down. Early on I reached out to Cupra to see if I could port Audiowagon (it's open source) to my Raval and was told that apps are not allowed access to the USB drives, only streaming is allowed.

So that seems to be it. Hence cabled Android Auto on my phone

Audiowagon on Google Play Store
 
Yes the VW.OS or whatever they may call it, VW implementation of Android Automotive their playstore is managed by Harman. It's a walled garden of apps.


Suppose to be called the ready link appstore.


The Ready Link Marketplace


You probably have to make representations to your app developer to get it in the store. Harman public PDFs on what needs to be done by Android programmers.

Use to be called the Ignite Store. Harman is a subsidiary of Samsung. Payment of any payable apps is done via Samsung.

Developers page:

 
Yes the VW.OS or whatever they may call it, VW implementation of Android Automotive their playstore is managed by Harman. It's a walled garden of apps.


Suppose to be called the ready link appstore.


The Ready Link Marketplace


You probably have to make representations to your app developer to get it in the store. Harman public PDFs on what needs to be done by Android programmers.

Use to be called the Ignite Store. Harman is a subsidiary of Samsung. Payment of any payable apps is done via Samsung.

Developers page:

I'll dig into that. I'm actually a retired software engineer. I was in the game from the mid-80s to 2017. Thanks.
 
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I use to stroke scientific computers keeping them warm. 1972, PDP8, me and a teletype 43. Pride and joy of the Maths and Physics Department. Their toy for numerical analysis. You seed a formulae and off it would go to solve it. Those formulas that can't be solved any other way except by numerical analysis. The maths lecturer didnt like the ICL1904S and opted for 8 bit computing. Core memory and all that. I dont think it was locked up. Anybody could walk in unlike the mainframe with operators. The old days, deck of cards, punch tape and an elastic band to keep it together ❤️ .
 
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