E300-18

I tried this yesterday. I used voice command to play music I had saved on my phone. It sort of worked, but the music was just coming out of the phone's speaker. On the rare occasions that I receive a phone call, that goes over the car speakers fine. Is there something I'm missing?

I'm guessing that Apple Carplay would work OK, but I rarely plug my phone into the USB.

whoover

I'm not an Apple guy, but on my Android there's a setting to tell it to send audio to the connected BT device. Look for such a setting.

Egonvdv

when phone is connected through bluetooth, it shows up as a media device & u can play all music on the phone

Cerave

Do you guys notice a sound quality difference between playing music via Bluetooth vs a wired connection?

DFWdude

LOL, yes. And not in a good way.

Better to put your (320kbps) tunes on a USB drive and go from there. Very easy...

E300-18

Well, it started working, although I don't really understand it. I started the car and pushed the media button on the console. I selected the media source option, and it showed "no device connected" for all sources, including bluetooth. Just for the heck of it, I selected the bluetooth option, and the music started playing.Thanks for getting me pointed in the right direction.

E300-18

The iPhone has a similar setting that displays automatically when it is doing audio over bluetooth. The Mercedes bluetooth device was already selected, so I don't understand why it wasn't initially playing over the car speakers.

E300-18

I did test using a wired connection with CarPlay before the bluetooth started working. To my ear, the sound quality was identical. An audiophile might notice and appreciate a difference.

From a technology standpoint, I wouldn't expect bluetooth to be a problem. I see plenty of people using bluetooth earbuds.

whoover

It depends a lot on the quality of the streamed audio and your expectations. As long as you're admittedly not being hypercritical, and your streams are .mp3 (even 320 kb), you should be fine. You might find artifacts like jittery playback or noise introduced because the processor is trying to decode the stream and deal with volume and other meta commands contained in the stream. If not, you're fine.

Some of us use higher-quality, lossless streams like .flac instead of .mp3. These are much more of a challenge for BlueTooth bandwidth and are why copying the library to a thumb drive becomes important. With the high-end Burmester 3-D system, the difference between a lossless stream via USB and an .mp3 over BlueTooth is pretty easy to hear.

E300-18

That makes sense. I would agree that I'm not hypercritical, and I didn't purchase a sound system upgrade option with my car. My music did originally come from a CD, but I didn't even pay attention to the default options used to copy the music.

Egonvdv

I think the 1st time you need to manually connect to "bluetooth music", there after it will remember the phone

johnb8s

Ive been having similar problems to these

Equipment:
Car: Pre Mbux NTG 4.5
Car:Mercedes Benz E550 2009/2010
Iphone 11 XS Max software version 14.2 (has always worked and what im using now)
Iphone 12 XS Max software version 14.3 (what i wish was working coz who doesnt like a new phone for Xmas)

Basically the Iphone 11 XS Max works every time

The Iphone 12 works occasionally if you hold it in the left hand will chewing gum and changing gears with your foot. I cant find any other combination that works.

Its 10 at night here and I just reset the Network settings on the phone and it seemed to work ok. Further investigation will follow tomorrow once its light again

Both phones work perfectly for calls etc whan connected to the car. It is just the bluetooth audio streaming.

JakeW213

How about posting your comment in the w212 section? Eventhough issues are the same, theres too much of a chance that the cars OS is too different to make it worthwhile for a w213 owner.