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My Dension 500S BT is now working properly, which is to say, not very well.
Went back to the auto-electrical place on Wednesday, the guy apologised and said he'd wired it up to what he thought was constant power but actually wasn't, something about how my car maintains the electrics for a couple of minutes after the key is removed I believe. He said he's wired it straight to the fuse box now. Took him another half day, after the full day that the original installation took. (He's sited the unit inside the dashboard somewhere so he has to dismantle quite a lot of the car.)
Anyway, I bought a 250GB hard drive off Amazon for cheap, loaded it up with ALL THE MUSIC and lashed it up to the Dension. It does now remember where it's up to from turning the car off to turning it on again, but this has brought up some remarkable shortcomings with the UI and generally how it interfaces with a large collection of MP3s.
In short, none of the options such as ARTIST/ALBUM/SONGS/FILES or anything else really work worth shit, for example, even in basic 'FILES' mode you have to drill down to the folder you want using just two fucking buttons on the head unit (track back and forward for moving through menu items, and a long press on the same buttons to move 'in' or 'out' of the menu hierarchy or select an option at the bottom of it), which would be OK if it actually went to the next folder when it gets to the end of the one it's on, but no, it just goes back to the start of the folder, which necessitates clunking around in the horrible UI again to choose another, which isn't good when you're, y'know, driving over the mountain at 80mph.
ARTISTS is crap because it pulls back every artist from every MP3 tag on the entire drive, so of course with all the compilation albums on there your list of artists is massive, and it only loads in 30 items at a time which you have to scroll through, and then there's a pause when it loads in the next 30.
ALBUMS/SONGS have similar issues, and again it only loads in 30 items at a time which you have to scroll through, and then there's a pause when it loads in the next 30.
I appreciate that pretty much all of this is down to how it's basically an emulated CD changer, so for example the FILES crappiness is because the head unit thinks it's playing CD1 in the changer, it thinks CDs 2-5 are empty, and CD6 is where the Dension hacks in its menu and settings, so when 'CD1' finishes (i.e. a folder on the hard drive') it thinks there are no other CDs in the changer so it goes back to the start of 'CD1' (i.e. the same fucking folder again).
The 30 items at a time is a Mercedes limitation as well, the Dension instructions make explicit reference to this, I guess there's a limit to how much hackery they can do to get it working.
In the end the only option I could find that worked acceptably was to do a one-folder deep collection of albums on the hard drive (i.e. one folder per album on the root of the drive, nothing nested), and then just use the Dension's PLAY ALL option which does then indeed appear to start right at the start, and move through the folders on the drive in order. I've had to be very careful though to only put stuff on there that I'll want to listen to at any time, as in PLAY ALL there's no way to do folder selection, it's just track backwards or forwards.
I've got the S7 bluetoothed up to it, that works alright and maintains all the proper Mercedes controls like the steering wheel buttons, and there's a decent mic been fitted as part of the Dension installation. It also mutes the music and pauses it whilst you're on a call, then resumes the music correctly when the call ends, stuff like that.
Overall it works, but it's so hobbled by the limitations of having to work within a semi-hacked Mercedes eco-system that has no idea whatsoever what USB is, that the PLAY ALL solution will have to do. (For example, when you're playing an MP3 DVD from the Mercedes' own standard head unit, you can get a proper folder list and scroll through it with the cursor keys on the head unit, but because the Dension is an emulated CD changer, there's no concept of a folder list on a CD, so you lose the nice folder list and instead have to use the horrible system with the two buttons that they've come up with.)
In summary, would definitely not recommend to anyone else, at over £500 including installation, pretty wanky. On one level I'm very impressed they've made something that works at all, but the compromises in usability mean it's just not worth it IMO.
Still, it's in now, so whatever.
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