[doctorttt]

First time user of iDrive7 and I have zero idea how to create a playlist. Say I either have a bunch of albums imported to the internal storage or loaded into a usb thumb drive and I dont want to play all songs in every album, how do I create a list? Did some search here but posts were not related to G05/06

[doctorttt]

Can someone help please?

[mitch57]

Originally Posted by doctorttt

Can someone help please?

Below is what I was able to find in the owner's manual on this.

Creating the Favorites list

The current track can be assigned to a special playback list, the Favorites list. If the current track already belongs to the Favorites list, it can be deleted from this list. The Favorites list is displayed first when searching for playback lists.

Move the Controller to the right.

"Add to favorites" or"Del. from favorites"


Searching for playback lists

Move the Controller to the left.

"Media search"

"Playlists"

A list of all available playback lists is displayed.

Select the playback list.

Select the track at which the playback is going to begin.

Information on playback appears on the Control Display. A playback list is created from the search results.

[LexxM3]

I've played with this a bit last night. You can create standard .M3U playlists outside the car and place them anywhere on your USB media. Then, when importing to internal storage, those playlists will be imported (and after a short delay, indexed/retrieved) along with the music files. For both USB and imported Music Collection (internal storage), you access your playlists from <source>/Search/Playlist menu. Works for both MP3 and FLAC music files. Lots of tools out there to help you create and manage playlist M3U files.

iDrive seems to be fairly forgiving of the playlist format and both absolute and relative directory paths in the playlist files themselves worked fine. Incidentally, the M3U files are a simple text file with one file path for each specific music file. Shuffling a playlist is possible.

I also noticed that when importing to internal storage, iDrive will keep each individual imported media separately (example: two imports, one from USB drive named FOO and one from USB drive named BAR, will result in a FOO folder and a BAR folder in internal storage); so the name of your USB drive might matter for multiple imports.

[Nigel1500]

Hello,

I have a 128Gb dual USB - USB-C. It fits in the USB slot in the centre armrest.

I have set up folders as follows:

<drive>

- Music

- A
- B
...
- Z
- Mix
- Soundtrack

- Playlist

I file my albums by artist. I don't worry about Genre in the filing system. Mix and soundtrack albums get filed under those folders.

Eg: <drive>\Music\B\Billy Joel\42nd Street

Preparing files: I use .mp3 file format. To tell you the truth, I can't tell the difference in quality with anything better given the background noise of the a/c, engine, road, traffic, etc.

I use a free program called "mp3tag" www.mp3tag.de to fix all the tags, making artists names consistent because "Billy Joel" will appear as a separate artist to "BILLY JOEL" in idrive. Likewise, POP is different to Pop or pop in genre. As you can search via genre in idrive I've set up "70's Pop", "80's Pop", 90's Pop", and "Pop" for pop music since 2000. Same goes for Rock and a couple of other genres.

One nice thing about mp3tag is the "Extended Tags" editor which allows you to attach an image (jpg and png both work but others might be supported) of the album cover or artist. I go for album cover, which I usually get from Wiki.

Making Playlist: I use winamp to do this because its free and easy to use. www.winamp.com You'll find plenty of tutorials on making a playlist in winamp.

I save my playlists to the Playlist folder. winamp automatically handles the relative paths to the files. If you've pulled the songs from 3 or 4 albums it all just works. I use the format <Artist>-Favourites.m3u

I hope this helps.

[Nigel1500]

One more tip.

Keep AT LEAST ONE COPY OF EVERYTHING SOMEWHERE ELSE. I have a complete matching copy of the USB on my home media NAS. I have a separate external hard drive as a backup and for getting stuff ready. It has exactly the same files structure as the USB stick and NAS except for two addition folders:

- New
- Ready

I download music into "New". Once I've fixed the tags, added a cover and created a playlist I move it to "Ready". When I have a bunch of new stuff ready I copy the new stuff to the USB and NAS, then move it from "Ready" to the matching folders on the external drive.

If my USB stick is ever lost, stolen or broken I can just buy a new one and do a straight copy. The hours I've spent and spend on organising my music is worth far more than the cost of a spare device or two.

PS: my USB has been through the washing machine twice ... it still works!!! The USB, I mean ... not the washing machine ... which is fine ... never mind ...