I wanted to say that I have this same problem with my 2014 Mazda 6 Touring with Technology package (premium Bose audio), and it is certainly frustrating. Had I known of this issue prior to purchasing the vehicle, I would have definitely considered a different vehicle.
Not to rehash everything, but here are the symptoms that I am having with a 4th generation iPod touch (it's one generation behind currently). I only have about 700 songs loaded on the device, which consumes about 6 GB out of 16 GB total space.
1.
With USB connectivity: Every time the vehicle starts, it takes an unusually long time before it finishes reading the iPod... about 60 seconds (others have reported longer times), and it always starts at the beginning of the first song (alphabetically) every time. This means I have to manually search through artists to find who I want to listen to every time I get in the vehicle (when driving because the searching is long... this is especially bad when you're only driving for a few minutes to/from a location). I haven't had any luck getting playlists to work via the Mazda interface for USB/iPod, either, except by manually starting them from the iPod itself. Shuffle does work fine with the USB, but please note that it still will not resume and you do have to re-seed the shuffle by disabling/re-enabling shuffle or else you'll end up hearing the same songs in the same order (this is how Apple designs it - the problem here is that the vehicle doesn't resume from where you were in the shuffle, which effectively breaks their one-pass 'randomizer' which guarantees all songs will play every pass when shuffling). The bottom line is that except for long road-trips, the USB input is pretty much unusable because of these problems (except for charging the device).
2.
With Bluetooth Connectivity: Bluetooth connectivity works much better than the USB connectivity... it finds the device and starts playing music significantly faster than with USB... usually in about 20 seconds, and it resumes from where it left off (this is a must! ...though sometimes I have to manually press play once it finds the device to do so). The main problem with Bluetooth is that there are only a bare minimum of controls that work from the Mazda interface - the rest of them you'll have to go to the iPod for. You can't turn on/off shuffle, you can't use playlists, you can't browse artists/songs, etc/
EDIT: I thought you could turn these things on from the iPod, but you still can't shuffle (although I thought this was working yesterday). This makes it so that Bluetooth isn't very usable as an input source either.
EDIT 2: It looks like the secret might be that you have to shuffle your playlist and then start playing before playing through the car. I'm going to give this a try when I can (probably tomorrow, though).
3.
With Auxiliary input: EDIT: I bought an Auxiliary cable today to test with. I noticed right away that the sound quality with AUX is much, much worse than USB or Bluetooth. It is very noticeable how much worse it sounds. Of course, it also doesn't display track information. Even if shuffle works with this, the sound quality degradation with AUX makes it really hard to accept.
The sound quality with USB and Bluetooth is really quite good, so it's a real shame the USB connection has those problems, and that you can't shuffle via Bluetooth (though that seems to be Apple's problem). To be fair, the salesmen/dealers likely aren't aware of this at all (none of them I talked to at the location I purchased mine at even had an iPod to test with)... but I do expect Mazda corporate to step up to the plate and see if they can fix this.
In case anyone from Mazda is reading this, I just wanted to note that these problems do
not appear to be normal in the industry with other manufacturers, or even earlier Mazda vehicles from past years, and therefore the iPod functionality should be considered defective in 2014 Mazda 6 vehicles. I spoke with a customer service representative about a month ago and he said they are working on a fix, but I don't have any details on if or when that will be available.
Just for reference, here is another post about the same issue on a different forum, in in case they get more information there:
Ipod Integration 2014 touring and GTinteresting observation!!
The only
potential workaround I can think of involves Bluetooth, since starting at the first sound with USB makes that completely unusable. If you were to 'shuffle' the playlist, then manually add 0001 through #### to the start of the song name in the order of the shuffled playlist (or write a program to do that), you could achieve somewhat of a random playlist with Bluetooth. The only problem is you'd have to do this all over again to re-shuffle once you've played through everything (and it would look a little weird with the number before the title on the display). Still, it's better than nothing....?
