Speech control not available for this device

[thedba]

Add me to the list of people experiencing this randomly occurring problem - and to the list where the Sync fuse pull did the trick where nothing else did.

 

I have a fairly large collection of music on a 1TB USB drive - 9500 tracks, 75% of those are wma lossless and the other 25% are mp3. I paid for my CD's collected over many years and want to keep my music uncompressed and wma lossless is the only way to do that with Sync and still have metadata for the voice commands. I have a 2012 Mustang GT and Sync Gen1 v4.02. It takes about 10 minutes for the "indexing" process to complete - and then another 10 minutes to listen to her say "creating speech commands - please wait" (I test this by just asking Sync to "play track"). Not too bad for 220GB of music.

 

First - all works well. I can call up any track, album, artist, genre via voice command with pretty good accuracy. This may work for some length of time - a day, a week, or more - but eventually - the dreaded "creating speech commands - please wait" will occur. And that is without any changes to the USB drive - I just leave it in the car. No new songs, no deletes, no changes. Sometimes (rarely), this will complete and all is well again - but the vast majority of the time this event is followed by "speech control not available for this device" - and then I know I'm hosed.

 

I've tried the usual solutions - unplug usb, plug it back in again. Master reset. Factory reset. Clean up my metadata with syncmyitunes. Cut back on the number of tracks (I thought I had some success there but it wasn't consistent). Converted everything to mp3. Converted everything to wma lossless. No joy.

 

And then I finally got around to one of the suggestions made here by several people - pull the fuse (fuse #3 in my Mustang behind the front passenger kick panel). That did the trick - although I know I will be doing it again. I wrongly assumed that a master reset or factory reset would "reboot" Sync enough to clear up whatever was causing the issue. The fuse pull (counted to 30 before putting it back in) worked immediately on the first attempt. Sync did recreate voice commands - but nothing else needed to be done like with the master/factory resets. No re-pairing phone or resetting voice command settings. And also - no re-indexing. Once rebuilding of voice/speech commands was complete (about 10 minutes for me) everything worked as it should.

 

Also - be sure to let Sync complete it's indexing/rebuilding process as it seems to get confused when you stop it and start it. Keep in mind that in my case even if I waited for it to complete I would still get the "speech control not available" message in the end - until I pulled the fuse first.

 

Hopefully, this will encourage others like me who didn't bother pulling the fuse.

Edited March 26, 2012 by thedba

[thedba]

Update after 1 month:

 

The fuse pull method continues to work well, but was only temporary until I reduced the number of songs on my drive. On my system, there is definitely a relationship between the number of songs on my usb drive and the likelihood of getting the random "creating speech commands - please wait" and/or "speech control not available for this device" messages. For me, using WMA lossless for the vast majority of my songs, 9642 songs is too many for Sync to remain stable and not give me those messages. 9335 is where I'm at now (deleted a bunch of Christmas songs from the usb drive) and Sync has been very stable. I have also cleaned up my meta data using mp3tag and its scripting ability to ensure every meta data field has something valid - even if it's a value of "unknown" - although I really don't know how much this really mattered as far as Sync stability. As I pushed over the 9600 number transferring all of my cd's to the usb drive, I was pulling the fuse pretty much every day or two. I'm up to 4 days in a row with no issues so far with the 9335 song count. I read somewhere on the forum from a Ford person that the grammar limit of Sync is between 12000 and 15000 grammar objects. Not sure if Sync counts a song title as a single object or multiple objects for each component word.

 

Anyway, if I continue to go a few more days with no issues then I'll be fairly confident I can prevent the problem from occurring. I'm assuming everyone's "magic number" will be different based on Sync hardware and firmware version, but if you're stuck - try cutting your song total in half, pull the fuse, and see if you remain stable. Rinse, lather, and repeat until it works - then bump up until you experience the problem again and then you'll know your number.

 

Next step is to tap into the 2nd usb port on Sync to see if usb2 gets its own limit or if it shares with usb1. If the limits are separate, then I can mount the usb drive behind the glove box because I won't be changing its contents very often since it's stable and then use the usb slot in the center console for new music.

 

Hope this helps.

[thedba]

Update a couple of weeks later ...

 

A little more experience keeping sync stable with a large collection of songs:

 

Grammar object limit. From a lot of trial and error, the limit (point where I have frequent "speech control not available for this device" issues) appears to be a combination of distinct values of titles, plus artists, plus albums, plus genres. And for me, this total number seems to be somewhere around 12,000. To keep this number as low as possible but still useful for me, I used mp3tag (tag editor - works with my wma lossless as well as mp3's and other formats) to consolidate meta data where possible.

 

For example, I have a lot of "single" songs (not part of an album) so I don't really care what album they belong to since I won't be listening to them in album order. With that in mind, I just edited the album metadata for those singles to "Unknown". Reason for this is that duplicate values within a metadata category don't appear to count against the limit. So "Unknown" in the album metadata should count as 1 value against the limit even though I might have a few hundred songs with "Unknown" album. I did the same for genre (only for tracks I didn't really care about classifying).

 

My assumption is that a single track with a single value (e.g. "Test Value") for each of the metadata categories (title/artist/album/genre) burns a count of 4 against my limit. My assumption is also that "Test Value" counts as 1 against the limit (entire string) - not 2 where each word in the string counts. This metadata cleanup took quite awhile to do (manual effort but mp3tag makes it as easy as possible) but it seems to have paid off in that I've been able to add my other songs back in and sync is still relatively stable.

 

I say relatively because occasionally (once a week or so), for no obvious reason, sync will still give me the "creating speech commands - please wait" message - but as long as I let it completely finish (usually 5 to 10 minutes) then everything is back to normal. Only rarely now do I get the "speech control not available" message - and even when I do, taking the key out of the ignition (don't forget to open door - my car doesn't power off accessories for 10 minutes unless you do this) and then firing sync up again will almost always get me back to a working sync - although "creating speech commands" usually occurs first. At least I'm not pulling the fuse anymore.

 

I can live with this in order to have my entire collection in the car. I've even been able to add a couple of newer cd's lately with no problem - most likely due to tracks+artists+albums+genres is now way less than 12,000 - 15,000. While I was in cleaning up metadata I also found that sequentially numbering the tracks across a multiple cd album allows sync to play the entire album back in the proper order. So, leave cd1 track numbers alone, but start cd2 track number at max cd1 track + 1 and increment by one from there. mp3tag makes this easy to do. Until I did this sync would play the 2 track 1's together then the 2 track 2's, etc.

 

And I connected a mini-usb cable to the usb2 output on the back of the sync unit and it works exactly as expected. Just say "USB2" at the sync voice prompt (there's no menu option for USB2 on my sync version) and from there it's no different than "USB". Sync will already recognize the drive that was previously connected to USB1 - no reindexing, etc. It's just another place to physically connect the drive. Which is nice because I can now keep my drive behind the glove box to free up storage space in the center console.

 

Again, I hope this helps someone else avoid some aggravation. I'd love to hear feedback on my assumptions from others who have drilled into the details or hopefully from one of the sync engineers. Do I wish sync handled a large collection flawlessly out of the box? You bet. Is this a PITA to get stable? You bet. But it was worth the effort for me to get to the point where I'm at - a voice controlled platform to listen to any song I can think of in the car.

 

Good luck.

[thedba]

Update after 2 months ...

 

Sync fuse pull count: 0

"Speech control not available for this device" count: 0

"Creating speech commands - please wait" count: 2

 

Still not sure why Sync felt the need to create speech commands the two times it did since I didn't add/change anything on the USB drive during that time. Both times I just let it do its thing for 5 minutes and all was well. I've added a few songs since with no problems, so I think this is about as good as it's going to get - which is actually pretty good considering where I started.

 

My conclusion:

 

If you have a large music collection that you want to control via voice commands with Sync, then clean up your metadata so that tracks+artists+albums+genres is less than 12,000. And be patient when Sync decides to occasionally (re)create speech commands for no apparent reason.

[HueMann]

I just have to say WELL DONE for being able to suss that out and re-engineer Sync toward usable stability. Congratulations are in order. <applause>

[thedba]

I just have to say WELL DONE for being able to suss that out and re-engineer Sync toward usable stability. Congratulations are in order. <applause>

 

Thank for the applause :). It just became one of those "me against the machine" things that you typically get when you push a system to its limits.

 

Update after almost 1 year ...

 

I hadn't mentioned that I had tried to simplify things relatively early on in this process by having all of my songs in the "root" folder of the USB drive. I thought this would help to not confuse/overload Sync. A few months ago, I reorganized the USB drive so that each artist goes in its own folder - much like iTunes does. The free program MediaMonkey makes this extremely easy by reading your track metadata and creating all of the folders for you. Anyway, as you might imagine - that really sped up switching between songs (and browsing on my laptop), even though that wasn't my goal. A perceived byproduct is that I've gone from the infrequent "creating speech commands" to absolutely none at all in over 5 months.

 

I haven't been on this forum in a long time. I'm still hoping a Sync engineer can provide some insight here without revealing IP. Just some basic guidance on how to squeeze the most out of Sync.

 

Until then, my checklist for those wanting to push sync to its limits in terms of number of songs:

• Keep tracks+artists+albums+genres less than 12,000 (duplicate names within a category don't seem to count - so if you don't care about a category then just set it to "unknown" - blank might work as well).
• To have a fighting chance of achieving that goal, CLEAN UP YOUR TRACK METADATA (use mp3tag or other bulk tag editing software). Warning - this is a tedious process.
• Optionally - organize your tracks in folders by artist. I'm still not sure this did anything other than speed up Sync (and pc) response time, but (knock on wood) my system has been rock solid after that final tweak.
• When in doubt, don't fight it (you'll lose) - pull the Sync fuse for a few seconds and replace and let Sync recreate speech commands

[Justin Halbeisen]

Good work man. I'm hoping to get mint to work. i'm having issues getting one album to not show up as unknown.

[Justin Halbeisen]

I'm not sure how to see how much metadata each MP3 has, but I did find out what would fix the issue I was having. The album art (cover) was about 2MB and was causing sync to show the MP3 as unknown artist and the file name as the song title. I'm not trying to steal thedba's hard work. I just wanted to let people know what might also help. Thank you thebda your thread helped me fix my issue and will cause me to not have these issues in the future.

[unkilbeeg]

Someone else on this board suggested that you make sure that your tagging software uses ID3v2.3 if you're going to include cover art. He also suggested a maximum size of 500x500 (which works out to be a *lot* less than 2M.)

 

He said ID3v2.4 would not work with album art. I didn't test that, but I can tell you that using 2.3 and all covers less than 500x500 and the album art seems to work fine, with the rest of my metadata also showing up fine.

 

I'm going to try to clean up my metadata like thedba suggests. I don't care about genre, so I'll probably just set it all to "Unknown." That should buy me a fair amount of grammar items (and maybe make up for the album art.)

[thedba]

T + 2 years and counting (same car, same Sync system) ...

 

Just got back from the dealer where I had them apply TSB 13-09-22 (here's a link to a pdf of what it covers: http://www.allfordmustangs.com/forums/attachments/2011-mustang-talk/275674d1381605218-sync-tsb-13-09-22-tsb13-09-22.pdf). The TSB is for several Sync stability symptoms, but one of the ones listed is "speech control not available for this device".

 

They will update Sync (assuming you have Gen1 and your vehicle is listed in the TSB - most 2012-2013 vehicles are there) to 4.2.1.4. You won't see this update on the syncmyride site because they don't make it available for download. The dealer has to "reprogram the APIM" which you can't do.

 

WARNING!!! - It looks like the stability gains the update may provide are the result of a new, much lower limit on Sync's grammar objects - specifically track titles. Whereas I could use speech commands to pick specific tracks from my 9000+ collection with v4.0.2 (albeit with occasional "speech control not available for this device" aggravation) - I now get a response after indexing/rebuilding to the effect of, "because of the number of files on this device, voice commands are not available for tracks". I can still call up album, artist, genre, and search artist by voice command - but it now tells me that "track commands are not available for this device" when I say, "play track <whatever>".

 

It looks like they've now set a hard limit (and don't tell you what that is to make it fun for you ) to make the system more stable for the vast majority of folks who aren't pushing the limits of number of tracks.

 

See posts 6 and 12 from ALBEE49 on the Sync community boards who went from voice command of 6500 songs down to 3300 after updating to 4.2.1.4 from 4.0.2 similar to me:

http://boards.synccommunity.com/discussions/Welcome_to_SYNC_Owner_to_Owner/Media_Players/Max_Hard_Drive_Capacity/fordsyncmb/8159.1?random=0.4546588907467687&nav=messages&success=true

 

Short story is the engineers are saying the update is functioning as designed with the more restrictive limit on grammar objects. And I've confirmed that trying master reset and factor defaults and disconnecting battery, etc. don't fix the issue (why would they?) and seen several posts that the upgrades are a one way trip (can't revert to previous version).

 

I'm going to try to make the best of it and attempt to put my entire collection on the USB drive and see if it will give me voice commands on everything except tracks. Then I'll have a choice between that or a much smaller set of songs with track voice commands. The simple way I'm doing this now is, "search artist" and then scroll through the songs either directly or through the songs of one of the albums (it prompts you for All Albums or you can choose one).

 

I've seen other posts asking why anyone would ever want this much music. For me, it's not about the number of songs I listen to (I'll never listen to them all) - it's that I can (or at least could before) call up just about any song I can imagine and have it instantly available.

 

As my kids would say, "1st world problems ...".

Edited February 28, 2014 by thedba

[thedba]

Interesting. I now have my entire collection of 11,000+ tracks on Sync and it's completely stable. This was not possible with the previous version. No track voice commands at all (significant loss of capability), but all other voice commands work fine. Play artist, play album, and search artist/album work as expected and I can get to the track I want pretty quickly with those.

 

At first I was pretty annoyed at the loss of track voice commands, but I can live with the trade off of having absolutely all my tracks available - with voice commands getting me in the ballpark and scrolling through a few track titles from there. Not that I have a choice anymore.

[OldGeek]

Thanks thedba for this thread and your work on this problem. Newbie here. Just bought my F150XLT with My Ford System (Screen w/o nav). I carry my MP3 collection on an iPod classic 180GB. I have 21,500 tracks. Every time I start the truck, the voice gives me the business about voice commands. I just skip forward to the next song to cut her off. My meta data is in pretty good shape. As long as I'm willing to shuffle (either internal to the iPod or external via the SYNC) everything is fine. However, when I get to a song/album/artist that I want to hear more of, there's no apparent way to stop the shuffle..... Any thoughts? Thanks.

[JScullin]

My '13 Fusion worked fine just up until yesterday. My 32gb iPod Touch now randomly drops out, stops responding and causes the radio to flip out. And Sync will tell me VC isn't available for this device. Nothing has changed as mine is a non-MFT system.

 

Doing a restore on my iPod now, but I didn't see this thread until after I started and decided to google it.