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Problems with Garmin 645 Music

Ozimodo
over 4 years ago

This post is intended to inform people thinking of buying this watch. It outlines what I think are problems and will be updated as I experience new issues or if issues are addressed by Garmin.

Issue 1. Garmin Pay will require a pin every time you use it. Garmin may say otherwise but my experience is that in order to pay for something you will need to first select the wallet app and then go through a difficult and slow process to enter your pin on the watch (all up takes around 30 secs). Have tried all of the posted work-arounds, none work, effectively Garmin Pay is not a usable payment solution.

Issue 2. Unless you have a Spotify premium account you can pretty much forget about connecting to the major streaming services. Google Play and Apple etc are not supported. If you read otherwise, its wrong.

Issue 3. Copying music by USB does not group by album. I get around this by using genre etc instead. I have tried both Windows Media Player and MediaMonkey to re-tag the songs, neither resolved the issue. Transferring via Garmin Connect produces the same result.

Issue 4. Hotkeys are disabled. No reason I can tell than Garmin wants to make their higher end watches more attractive. 

Issue 5. In Australia, far less banks support Garmin Pay than Google Pay etc. Make sure you check with your bank first.

Issue 6. The watch consistently gets stuck between some screens. This is affecting my Strava stats, for example it takes over 10 minutes to save a workout and adds that 10 minutes to the overall run time (makes me look even slower than normal...). Note that no 3rd party apps etc have been installed. Update 18/6 - Garmin Support have advised that this is a known issue and that I have been added to an "open investigation". They cannot advise if/when it will be resolved.

There are many other niggly/buggy issues as well, convinced now this watch is not a keeper. Def not as solid as a 235 or 935.

Looking through the responses I can see this post has attracted at least one professional deflector from Garmin, just makes things even sadder..

  • 0 over 4 years ago

    for #1, you need to make sure your watch has the WHR on all the time.  That's how the watch can tell it's been taken off and requires the pin next time you use GP.  Other than that, you only need the pin every day.  It's been working for me for a long time.

    #3, I'm on windows, and use Windows Media Player to load music (I find it easier than using GE), and albums come through fine.

    #4, Hotkeys have never been available on this level of watch, so it's not something that was disabled. It was never there.  See the fr 23x,630,735.

  • 0 over 4 years ago

    # 3 I transfer directly from Garmin connect and I see the albums correctly

  • 0 over 4 years ago

    Issue 1: The pin works randomly for me. On the rare occation I only have to enter it once and it lasts for a day, other times it does not matter how many times i try, it wont work. Usually it is about 3 times that I need to put in the pin before it accepts it for the day.

    I always have HR on auto. I toggled it off and on just now and the pin worked first time, but it just may have been one of the rare flukes.

  • 0 over 4 years ago in reply to jim_m_58

    Re. #3, I've never really used Windows Media Player before but I started playing with it yesterday after reading your post - I couldn't find a way to load directly to the forerunner. Is there a way to do this or are you still using Garmin Express and just using Media Player for organization?

  • 0 over 4 years ago in reply to ThrownClear

    I only use it for organisation, Garmin Connect or USB for copying

  • 0 over 4 years ago in reply to ThrownClear

    With WMP, click on the sync tab in the upper right, then you can drag and drop music under it, and when you're ready, click on "Start Sync".  No GE involved.

    The watch looks like an off the shelf mp3 player in WMP.

  • 0 over 4 years ago in reply to jim_m_58

    Excellent! Thank you!

  • 0 over 4 years ago

    I use mediamonkey and my albums come through fine although I do send them as playlists I think Thinking

  • 0 over 4 years ago

    My albums come over OK via direct USB transfer. The issue is that the album name should be specified in the "metadata" that is embedded in the MP3 file (along with the artist name and track number). That's how the songs get grouped into an album by the player. Most of my music has been ripped from CDs and it's the ripping program (Media Player in my case) that puts the data into the files. In any case, I have not had a problem with albums showing up and playing correctly.