2008 Dodge Grand Caravan SXT: Hard Drivin'

To a certain segment of the reading population there are more important elapsed time figures than those accompanying a 1/4-mile acceleration test. One such figure is the elapsed time it takes to transfer music from a CD to the Caravan's MyGIG 20-gig hard drive. When it comes to living with a minivan, I think they might be right.

The first time we transferred music from disc to HDD, it seemed to take forever...

So we decided this morning to put a clock to it. Our test disc was Radiohead's newest, In Rainbows. Its 10 songs add up to 42.6 minutes of playing time and take up 431 MB. This took a not-too-painful eight minutes to transfer, which included probably half a minute or so of my fumbling with the system's less-than-intuitive menu system. True, it took only three minutes to import the contents of the disc to my laptop through iTunes. But eight minutes is in keeping with Chrysler's estimate of a 12-minute import time for an hour of music.

Great right? Well, except that MyGIG is supposed to automatically use Gracenote database to identify artist, album and track names. It didn't work. A brief scan of the forums turned up numerous similar complaints. Close as I can figure, the database must be updated frequently to include newer releases. Chrysler says we should visit our dealer for an update. Ug. --Daniel Pund, Senior Editor, Detroit @ 1,310 miles

Categories: 2008 Dodge Grand Caravan SXT

14 Comments

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kevlang says:

01:21 PM, 04/25/08

wow, someone who actually paid money for "In Rainbows". =)

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dougtheeng says:

01:42 PM, 04/25/08

I think any system would break when trying to installed Radiohead. MyGig is not large enough to deal with Thom's ego.

carswapper says:

01:58 PM, 04/25/08

Damn....for a moment when I saw the headline I thought you had taken my suggestion from a few posts ago and hit the track with it. Disappointment surrounds me today.
I havent found a need to load music into the mygig. With the satellite radio and the cd and plug in for my iPod the 20 gig hard drive seems rather superfluous.

opfreak says:

02:01 PM, 04/25/08

so it doesn't compress the files at all?

i would geuss that apple itunes not only imports the song in 3mins, it squeezes them down as well?

jr1m90 says:

02:14 PM, 04/25/08

opfreak:
iTunes could probably compress it to some degree, but you'd lose some of the quality (obviously. Though whether it make a difference on the Caravan's stereo is debatable). By default, I think iTunes copies the songs at full bit rate and size.

8 minutes to load a CD seems like an eternity, were you listening to the CD while importing by chance? That tends to slow things down (at least on my computer with iTunes) as the CD drive has to jump to different parts on the CD to play the CD and import from it.

desmolicious says:

03:48 PM, 04/25/08

8 minutes to load? Why not just listen to the cd. Takes a couple of seconds to load, then a fraction of that to access any song.

heidis says:

04:03 PM, 04/25/08

Until these head units have direct internet access, there's absolutely no way that the internal static music databases will ever be up to date without regular software updates. I hope that Chrysler is going to make it easy for customers to get these Gracenote database updates. Check out this site in the interim to find out the status of software updates for the Mygig systems. http://mofv.com/mygig/ But as always, check with your dealer to see if they've got a pipeline on the discs for these updates.

allenychung says:

04:10 PM, 04/25/08

Is there an option for compressing the music? 431MB per CD, that seems an awful lot, about 10MB per minute of audio. By comparison, a 128KB rate MP3 is only about 1MB per minute, you can always go lower, for me, I can hear a difference when you dip below 128KB.

So, say, 20gigs is 20,000MB, 431MB per CD, MyGig will only hold 46.4 CDs worth of music, I guess that's not a trifle number, but that's way less an iPod, song for song.

danielpund says:

04:12 PM, 04/25/08

kevlang: What you don't know is that I bought the CD at Starbucks. So I'm a sucker for The Man twice. Cut me some slack--I was on a long road trip and had burned through everything I'd brought already. Good album though.

jrlm90: I was not listening to the disc while transferring it. MyGIG won't let you do that. You can, however, listen to the radio while transferring.

ahightower says:

09:16 PM, 04/25/08

I guess I can see the advantages of this over an iPod interface. But I can't see paying so much for it.

04:09 AM, 04/26/08

confession - i bought it too. =) MP3s sound lousy on a good hifi system, unless they're ripped at a very high rate. i had no desire for the low-fi "free" version they offered.

firstwagon says:

04:26 PM, 04/26/08

What I want with systems like this is to be able to connect a laptop to it so I can download my own updates.

Are there any out there that you can access with a laptop?

07:46 PM, 04/26/08

cars are not hi-fi with few customs cases.

all the road noise, kills the enivorment.

and mp3 at 128k will sound worse. however at 192k in a car should sound transpernt to a cd. And other compression is even better. wma for example is as good at 128k as mp3 is at 192k.

bimmerjay says:

03:18 PM, 04/28/08

128k mp3s sound horrid on both my home system and my car's Logic7. 192k is decent but 256k is best when you have an audiophile system. File size be damned, storage is cheap nowadays.