I suggest you start with a blank memory stick though. You need to take a look at this thread - in particular the bit where I run thorugh using DoubleTwist - this will give you playlists and Album Artwork from iTunes without having to drop and drag etc.
Hopefully this is something the manufacturer will update via firmware at some point.Īnyone had this or even better found a workaround? Didn't want to have to start removing less-loved albums and things - nice just having everything there. I've tried reformatting, removing hidden system index files that windows puts there, but the results are the same. Folders about halfway through "p" disappear, for a total of just about 15k tracks that I can browse in the car. All the folders show up initially, but after a few seconds the system seems to lose sight of loads of them. Moving to the F36 the tracks don't take that long to index metadata and the search is much faster, but. Browsing by metadata was too slow to be practical, but I organised my folders by alphabet letter/artist/album and it's quite navigable. Previously I'd been using a Kingston 256Gb thumb drive with no problems (about 23k+ tracks, so I'm definitely at the extreme end) with no problems. So here's my experience, which I think will relate: I've only this week moved from a 2012 E92 coupe to the 2015 F36 gran coupe (pro nav, HK sound). but as others have already pointed out, this solution is £225 cheaper than a 64GB iPod Touch! I appreciate this all seems rather laborious and long-winded to some. This was for a music collection of approx 7,000 tracks (40GB). On the first time of use, the search options did not appear straight away (only Folder Search, as before - cue further temporary disappointment), however within 3-4 minutes all the data appeared, including the playlists, presumably after iDrive indexing. Using this approach, my USB drive now works perfectly, including playlists. I had >1000 tracks with no composer information. if there are a lot of tracks with no composer, you can simply enter "Unknown Composer" for all of them.
If you have a lot of tracks with missing data, you can save time by selecting a block of tracks and updating the missing fields en masse with the same entry - e.g.
I have quite a lot of tracks with missing metadata that have been in my iTunes library for years from when I used to download songs for free from P2P sites.
You then 'sort by' each of the 5 columns and make sure there are no missing fields (the empty fields appear at the top of the list when you click on each column heading). Artist, Title, Album, Genre and Composer. However to simplify things, you can set the visible columns to show only those that are relevant to iDrive, i.e. In Mp3tag, there is initially quite a bewildering amount of info on display. Fully functional free trial download available:
Tip for Mac users: Mp3tag is a Windows only program, however you can run it on a Mac using software called CrossOver, which allows you to run Windows programs on OS X without the need for a virtual Windows machine. I used one of the tiny Sandisk 64GB USB 'Cruzer Fit' sticks like this (£15 from Amazon): I then followed NotBob's instructions to the letter, with the only exception that I didn't bother ensuring all the album artwork was present. I suffered many of the same problems described by others, principally the inability of iDrive to search by Artist, Album, Genre etc. Many thanks to all the previous posters, especially NotBob for the very detailed OP. Thought I would post my experiences on this subject. The only thing that bugs me about my 15 plate car is the awful DAB which is pointless.no signal then 10 minutes then no signal! Total waste and I just don't bother with it now. Not bothered about playlists as I tend to listen to albums and this works brilliantly for me.
I have a 330d with pro nav and by doing it like this, I get all album cover artwork, all tracks in correct order (unlike my friends Audi) The idea of an in car hard drive is appealing but I'd be aware of it being always powered and risk of it crashing. I also copy MP3 albums to blank dvd-r which also hold around 30 albums.
I found that you typically get around 70 albums on one usb and they don't over heat, totally portable and readily changeable. I then buy plenty of 16gb usb sticks and load up the ' music collection' of the car and then keep others in the central compartment. I have a crazy amount of music on Cd and use Easy CD Creator (£25) to convert to FLAC for when listening around the house and then convert all to MP3 at best possible 320kbps. Hi, that all seems great but as someone in the audio industry, way too complex.