[Nigel1500]

Hi folks,

Inspired by another thread where someone has loaded music onto a micro USB drive, I tried putting some music on a USB to play in the car.

I put the music into a couple of sub folders. I-Drive seemed to ignore the folders and display all the music together. This means I had 2 x track 01 etc. In short, things seem a bit confusing so ...

1. How do you guys set up your music?
2. How do you group artists, albums, etc ... is this done with file attributes?
3. What are the best file formats? I have the standard hifi installation and I'm in my 50's ... 128 mp3 sounds fine to me.
4. Can I watch video? If so, what formats?
5. Back to audio ... some of the tracks had an album cover displaying. Is this an embedded jpg file or something? The USB only had 22 mp3 files on it.

[Paladin1]

You didn't mention how you got the music onto the drive. Best to get a program to rip individual CDs directly onto a USB drive from your home computer, if you're transferring from CDs. There are several inexpensive programs available (even free), I personally use dBpoweramp. Or just transfer digital music you have downloaded directly to the USB drive. Standard mp3 format works fine, but for lossless ripping from a CD, FLAC is the most common, uncompressed (or lightly compressed) format. If you transfer an album, the album art should transfer with it; individual files may also retain their originating album art. You can also transfer the files from your USB drive to your integrated HDD, up to around 25 or 28GB.

Some basic points - you need to get rid of the sub-folders and just format the drive in either FAT32, exFAT or NTFS. Without getting into the complexities of reindexing iDrive's music index, it's probably best to just buy a new USB drive from a different manufacturer and start over (max of 128GB). There's a whole thread or two on reindexing, but I don't have it ready to hand, and it requires using at least 5 different drives anyway. Important to use one from a different manufacturer, because iDrive is likely to "think" it's the same drive and keep your defective index - which is what you have. You might be able to just format your existing drive (sans folders) and reload your files, but it's likely to keep the duplicates you mentioned, or even add more.

Can't answer the video question, because I haven't tried it, but I believe video can only be run from a USB drive (not the internal HDD), and can only be viewed while stationary (but can be coded). I'm not familiar with the video formats that can be read, but MPEG-4 files should work I would think.

[Nigel1500]

Originally Posted by Paladin1

You didn't mention how you got the music onto the drive. Best to get a program to rip individual CDs directly onto a USB drive from your home computer, if you're transferring from CDs. There are several inexpensive programs available (even free), I personally use dBpoweramp. Or just transfer digital music you have downloaded directly to the USB drive. Standard mp3 format works fine, but for lossless ripping from a CD, FLAC is the most common, uncompressed (or lightly compressed) format. If you transfer an album, the album art should transfer with it; individual files may also retain their originating album art. You can also transfer the files from your USB drive to your integrated HDD, up to around 25 or 28GB.

Some basic points - you need to get rid of the sub-folders and just format the drive in either FAT32, exFAT or NTFS. Without getting into the complexities of reindexing iDrive's music index, it's probably best to just buy a new USB drive from a different manufacturer and start over (max of 128GB). There's a whole thread or two on reindexing, but I don't have it ready to hand, and it requires using at least 5 different drives anyway. Important to use one from a different manufacturer, because iDrive is likely to "think" it's the same drive and keep your defective index - which is what you have. You might be able to just format your existing drive (sans folders) and reload your files, but it's likely to keep the duplicates you mentioned, or even add more.

Can't answer the video question, because I haven't tried it, but I believe video can only be run from a USB drive (not the internal HDD), and can only be viewed while stationary (but can be coded). I'm not familiar with the video formats that can be read, but MPEG-4 files should work I would think.

Thanks for your reply.

I'm making some headway with this. I'm not going to load the music onto the car's HDD yet. The tools to manage files on that drive are far too limited. My HDD is 500Gb and contains 11,000 songs. Why do you recommend a 128Gb limit? My 500Gb drive is working fine.

Some of my music comes from my own CD collection. I use Winamp for that.

Music that has come from other sources I'm currently cleaning up with MP3Tag. It's gonna take a while.

I made my first playlist with Winamp and dropped it in the root folder. Working fine.

[Paladin1]

The car's HDD is about 30 GB, but not all usable. IDrive functions the same with music files whether they are on the USB drive or the HDD - the sole advantage of the HDD seems to be that you free up a USB port, but the size of the drive limits the number of albums you can store (a 128 GB USB drive will store 700 CDs or more). You can add files or albums to either drive and the car will reindex and recognize them.

The 128 GB USB limit is noted in the owner's manual, but I found the car will actually recognize a 256 GB USB drive and play music (maybe even a larger drive), show album art and function normally - it just won't keep your place when you turn off the car. The drive will always start on the same music file when you start the car again, regardless of what file or album you were listening to last. A 128 GB drive doesn't have that problem.

Here's a thread that might be useful:

https://g05.bimmerpost.com/forums/sh....php?t=1679737

[Nigel1500]

Hi Paladin,

My 512Gb portable drive is formatted as FAT32. It continues playing from wherever it stopped. I don't seem to have the problem experienced in the other thread you linked me to. Also, the index is updating fine. I'm working on files and folders over the weekend and of an evening to fix a few things like missing cover art or wrong values for Artist, Album or Genre, and every time I reconnect the drive it remembers where it was playing from ... and it automatically updates the index to display the new stuff I've been working on.

I've just received a new Scandisk Ultra Dual Drive m3.0 256Gb USB to go in the centre console. I'll migrate my stuff across in coming weeks and report back.

[Paladin1]

Great! Sounds like you're good to go - some of the problems others experienced may have depended on software version as well - 512 GB should give you plenty of storage! Had to tweak some of mine as well and add an album art JPG to the folder.

[Nigel1500]

Originally Posted by Paladin1

Great! Sounds like you're good to go - some of the problems others experienced may have depended on software version as well - 512 GB should give you plenty of storage! Had to tweak some of mine as well and add an album art JPG to the folder.

Update. My 512Gb USB is 1mm too large to close the centre console cover, so I switched to a 128Gb USB-C for the centre armrest USB-C port .... NOW I have the problem with the music always starting on the default album ... grrrrrr!

[Paladin1]

Originally Posted by Nigel1500

Update. My 512Gb USB is 1mm too large to close the centre console cover, so I switched to a 128Gb USB-C for the centre armrest USB-C port .... NOW I have the problem with the music always starting on the default album ... grrrrrr!

Changing the port may have bolixed it. Might try the re-indexing thing again - I actually had to do it a couple of times to get to normal.... Or maybe better (small enough for the center console):

https://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-128GB...dp_ob_title_ce

[Nigel1500]

Thanks for the tip on the UltraFit. I'll pick one up some time.

[007bandido]

Hello,
This USB key works perfectly... https://www.samsung.com/us/computing...-muf-256ab-am/