Hey everyone,

I'll preface this by saying I know the car's a little long in the tooth so it just may be that I'll have to live with this but it's still an annoyance,

I've been using my iPhone as an iPod for the life of the car. Never saw an issue like this until now. What's happening is when listening to an album or playlist (all music is synced to the phone so not streaming), when it goes to the next track, the display we'll revert to showing the first track in the album/playlist, even though the correct audio is playing. Disconnecting and reconnecting the device corrects it but it happens at least every other song. This seems to have just started happening in the last month or so. A few things that changed:

Now on iOS 18 (biggest suspect)
Using my iPhone 13 Pro Max (retired my XS Max)
Using ALAC files now instead of 320kbps m4a

If I press next track, sometimes it will flash to the wrong first track and then update to the correct track. It seems to be some kind of lag issue,.

Since I couldn't revert my iOS, I borrowed my wife's phone which is still on 17.61 but I saw similar behavior with that too. I'm starting to think the issue is with later model phones. Never saw this with the XS Max.

I don't want to use Bluetooth since the sound quality is better with the direct connection. I'm using the official Apple cable and it's not frayed or anything,

Wasn't sure if there's maybe a service menu option to check on this. I'm wonder if there's some kind of data corruption with what the car recognizes when it sees music on the device.

Hoping some others here have the same device and can chime in with their experience,

 

Maybe try a different cable?