Getting the custom POI files to work on Nuvi 3590

The built in POI's that come with the map are separate from custom POI's. You search for them with a separate selection on the "Whare to" menu. The advantages of custom POI's are as you indicated ... accuracy and completeness. The built in POI's are a sampling of all possible POI locations, and there have been many complaints about missing or out of date POI's.

As you suspected, your unit does not support MP3 files, so you will need to install the SOX.EXE utility on your computer and use .WAV files. To get alerts for the Walmart file, you will need to run POI Loader in manual mode and specify a proxmity alert distance for that file.

Congrats on your first post. Let us know how things are working out and if you need more help with anything. (Remember, too, that posting messages will eventually gain you Active User status which gives you continuing free access to the redlight and speed camera files.)

Audio alerts for your nuvi:

http://www.poi-factory.com/node/25730

As pointed out by alandb, Custom POIs are searched differntly from the built-in map POIs. To find your loaded Custom POIs, tap:

WhereTo
Extras
Custom POIs

Be careful with setting alerts. Alerts are great for redlight and speed cameras, upcoming Rest Areas, and such but do you really want an audio alert every time you pass a Wal-Mart (or McDonald's or Starbucks, etc.)?

PS--with the Custom POIs downloaded from The Factory: if you find a missing Wal-Mart or a misplaced or missing location to any of our POIs, please report the issue to the Factory's person responsible for maintaining the POI file. That's how we keep the files here as accurate as possible.

I am assuming this is the Garmin file, but I also see you downloaded the poi-factory camera files.

You will need to convert .mp3 files to .wav files. To do this go to http://media.io/ and upload the mp3 files and convert them to wav files.

What you did was correct except for needing wav files (and sox.exe per previous post)

You need to look for your custom POIs (versus the builtins) under Where To? > Custom POIs

The beauty of the poi-factory files is that members will notify the file maintainer of new locations they have seen (especially for Walmarts and rest areas)

To get alerts on your unit, you must enable them
1. by Settings > Proximity Alerts
and
2. running POI Loader (as previous noted above)in "Manual" mode to establish the distance "along the road" at which you wish the alert to occur.

Thanks to everyone who responded I am at work and do not have the Nuvi right now but I will bring with me tomorrow and go from there. One thing I did not know was to go to the where to menu and select the POIs. I feel pretty stupid with that, but I guess it was not obvious to me as I have never used custom POIs before.

Thanks again and I will post results......

Mike

That's what we are here for. We have all felt that way at one time or another

I used the Nuvi briefly this morning and, thanks to everyone's advice, was able to look at the custom POI's that I have downloaded so far. The Wal Mart address was correct! I am not seeing any icons for the correct Wal Mart though, and I assume that if I do a regular search either though the keyboard or voice for Wal Mart, then the unit does not also look in the custom POI list?

Thanks again for the info on the sound files I will experiment a bit more at the end of the week when I have more
time...

That's great.

To see icons for Custom POIs, you may need to be zoomed in a bit. You could also create a route to your nearest Wal-Mart--that should bring up the icon as you approach it. If zooming and routing still don't show them, there may have been an issue loading the bmp file so get back to us.

Well, I am making some progress; on Friday I got an alert for a red light camera with voice and icon.

However, the alert stayed on the screen well past the alert point, then I could not get rid of the info, which was in gray on top of the screen. If I tapped on the gray bar it would give me the option to navigate there but would not let me take the alert off of the screen. Had to shut down and turn the Nuvi back on. Tried it on the way back, same thing.

I also drove by the Wal-Mart nearest me, I set proximity alerts just to test it, and I did not get any alerts or icons for the Wal-Mart whatsoever, and I used Voice command to search for Walmart, but it brought up the old one that has been torn down.

Also, I take it that if I use POI loader it does not overwrite the files that are there (if they are different, of course) or do I need to load all files I have each time, or just ones that are new?

By the way, I have made sure that all of the gpx files, wavs, bmps etc are the same name except for the extension and sox.exe is in the same directly as the executable for POI loader.

Good work on the redlights!

I don't have an answer for it staying on the screen. That's very odd. Hopefully someone can offer some help here.

Wal-Mart alert: This will be an issue for many many POI files and it's because they're working as designed. Alerts will occur when the actual POI location is on your route. If the actual POI location is for the building and is set back more than a few tens of feet from the roadway, it will not alert. There are two fixes for this: 1) (not recommended) revise the location of each POI in the file to be the street entrances to the building's parking lot or 2) Change the POI file name (and of course, the icon and wav filename) to a TourGuide, then set a radius alert for this TourGuide with POI Loader in manual mode for a distance large enough to give you the desired alert. Check the forums and faqs here for more on TourGuides. This works successfully for me with the schools POI file which I've set to a TourGuide and therefore get alerts for schools even though the POI file lists the actual school location as being set back from the roadway.

Regarding Voice Commands to search for Wal-Mart, remember that your Voice Commands need to search Extras/CustomPOIs/Wal-Mart (or something like that for the 3590). A normal POI search will only search the map's built-in POIs including the old one that's been torn down--you need to search the Custom POI Wal-Mart file to see the POIs you've installed with POI Loader.

When using POI Loader, if the filename chosen when installing POIs is the same as a current POI file on your device, you will overwrite all the old data. This is actually the way I use POI Loader and therefore I do need to reload all my POIs each time I run POI Loader even if I'm just updating one set of POIs of my various Custom POIs present on the device.

If your 3590 Voice Commands work as they do on my 2460, Voice Commands can not take me to Extras and therefore can not take me to my Custom POIs and therefore, you can only reach your Wal-Mart Custom POIs by tapping your nuvi, not by use of Voice Commands*

tafkam, if you really want to Voice Command to your Wal-Mart, set it as a Favorite since Favorites are Voice Commandable.

*I could be wrong and if so, I hope someone here at The Factory with a nuvi 2460 can tell me how I can use Voice Commands to get to Extras!

One more reason to keep my 885 running. I can (and often do) use the voice commands to search the Extras.

Thanks for the info, I am brand new to using custom POI's and I did (and still don't to some degree) understand how they integrate with the regular map and settings on the Nuvi.

Even though the custom POI may display on the map I take it that it will not show up when doing a navigation search. For example, this morning I did a search for the Walmart near me one more time, and it still shows the old store which has been torn down. HOWEVER after removing and installing all of my POI's yesterday, now I do see the icon for the correct Walmart in the correct area. So, at least things are starting to work.

The icon was very small, probably half the size of the stock icons on the Nuvi; I did not change the size (I downloaded the first Wal Mart icon on the list here) so don't know what is going on with that, may try to enlarge it a bit or make my own.

Thanks again and if anyone has any suggestions please let me know.

Oh, sorry but one other thing. There is a Wendys I drive by at least 3 times a week. The icon for Wendys seems to be sporadic. I know that I had it earlier in the year, but I think I lost it after a map update. I just did another map update about a week ago and the Wendy's icon was back. So I thought it was just a map version thing. However, this morning it was gone again. Any ideas? I don't really care if I have the icon or not as I don't usually go to Wendys anyway but I am just wondering what would cause the icon to appear then disappear a few days later with no changes in software or maps....

Correct, Custom POIs are not searchable in the way built-in POIs are. You must go to Extras/Custom POIs to be able to find or route yourself to them. By the way, if you have the Wal-Mart Custom POI file loaded and you go to Extras/CustomPOIs/Wal-Mart, you will be shown only the 50 nearest Wal-Marts in order of as-the-raven-flies distances. If you set your location in Simulator mode to a different current location, you'll be the 50 nearest Wal-Marts to that location.

Regarding sporadic POI icons appearing: many nuvi models need to have the map zoomed in before icons appear. If yours is one, the presence of icons may vary with your current zoom level.

Take your time. These nuvis offer a lot and in the beginning, they can overwhelm. With time (and with reading and posting at The Factory), all will make more sense.

Thanks again I appreciate the replies and I know a lot more now about the procedures than I did on my first post.

Mike

Icons