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      03-25-2014, 06:46 AM   #23
mynamesnotbob
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Quote:
Originally Posted by nordberg View Post
Back takes you back to Search, which then means you have to navigate to the folder you're already playing music from.

What I would like to be able to do is quickly get to the Artist folder so I can select another album by the artist.....
Ah I see you're navigating the folders, not by metadata.

If you search via meta data, the search you had selected is still there, the artist and album etc already there, you just change album.

If you are navigating by folders, I've no idea - I find that quite clunky so don't use it, as like you said it goes back to the root all the time. The interface was designed around the tags, not as a file browser.
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      03-25-2014, 06:53 AM   #24
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Ah - I get you...

I will give that a go.... I knew there had to be a better way but, TBH, I've had so little time to play with the car since I got it, I've been suffering with the folder method....
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      03-25-2014, 07:00 AM   #25
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Quote:
Originally Posted by mynamesnotbob View Post
Ah I see you're navigating the folders, not by metadata.

If you search via meta data, the search you had selected is still there, the artist and album etc already there, you just change album.

If you are navigating by folders, I've no idea - I find that quite clunky so don't use it, as like you said it goes back to the root all the time. The interface was designed around the tags, not as a file browser.
This is getting very interesting... So how do I know if I'm searching by folder or metadata through my iDrive? I've never told it to do one or the other. I'm using an iPhone if that makes a difference???
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      03-25-2014, 07:18 AM   #26
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Originally Posted by BMWSKI View Post
This is getting very interesting... So how do I know if I'm searching by folder or metadata through my iDrive? I've never told it to do one or the other. I'm using an iPhone if that makes a difference???
iPhone will only show metadata (but not mp3 metadata, instead the attributes in the itunes/iphone library), it doesn't expose it's file structure to the car. The USB drives do, and it can be a way to search if don't have files tags just like you would on a PC.

Some people much prefer it, especially if they've done it for years, and normally say iTunes etc is cack as it won't let them do what they want.

I'm the same with photos on my Mac preferring them in folders, whereas I know the new fangled way is to have them in an indexed DB in iPhoto - but my brains still stuck in the 90's in that sense
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      03-25-2014, 07:27 AM   #27
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Quote:
Originally Posted by mynamesnotbob View Post
iPhone will only show metadata (but not mp3 metadata, instead the attributes in the itunes/iphone library), it doesn't expose it's file structure to the car. The USB drives do, and it can be a way to search if don't have files tags just like you would on a PC.

Some people much prefer it, especially if they've done it for years, and normally say iTunes etc is cack as it won't let them do what they want.

I'm the same with photos on my Mac preferring them in folders, whereas I know the new fangled way is to have them in an indexed DB in iPhoto - but my brains still stuck in the 90's in that sense
Ah OK. So am I pretty much stuck with what I've got if I want to keep using my iPhone?
I also hate how iPhoto organises images so I stopped using it straight away!
Is your background in IT? You seem pretty clued up on all this?
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      03-25-2014, 10:32 AM   #28
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Quote:
Originally Posted by BMWSKI View Post
Ah OK. So am I pretty much stuck with what I've got if I want to keep using my iPhone?
I also hate how iPhoto organises images so I stopped using it straight away!
Is your background in IT? You seem pretty clued up on all this?
Pretty much, although I think you can get a native view of the iPod through connected drive - never tried it myself to be honest, so I could be misunderstanding.

Fair to say I've learnt none of this from work, just playing around and getting my house and cars all working to get music and movies accessible from anywhere, you just learn what you need to, but I'm in tech related management consulting - no really it's as fun as it sounds!
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      03-25-2014, 03:47 PM   #29
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Great guide but sadly, until someone (or BMW) can work out how to play gapless albums (no 2sec gap between tracks), I'm stuck with iPod/IPhone.
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      01-02-2015, 11:22 AM   #30
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Force Reindex

Hi, I am almost to a point where I've gotten the USB disk option to work after following this excellent guide. However, I'm still not sure how to get the iDrive to read updates I make to the music or playlists on the disk...

You talk about SyncToy to update the disk, but it seems my car does not see anything I add after the first time the disk is indexed. Is there any way to force the car to reindex?
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      01-02-2015, 01:11 PM   #31
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Mine will see new files added either as files (although I drag the folder in, maybe thats the change that is seen) and new playlists, but if the files were existing and attributes renamed then it does not pick up the changes.

However for whatever reason it's not working on yours, so the easiest way is to rename the disk and idrive gets forced to reindex, at least it does in mine
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      01-02-2015, 03:00 PM   #32
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Quote:
Originally Posted by mproudfoot View Post
Great guide but sadly, until someone (or BMW) can work out how to play gapless albums (no 2sec gap between tracks), I'm stuck with iPod/IPhone.
?? I run a mix of lossless WMA and FLAC files off a USB stick and gapless playback works fine. I rip CDs with dBpoweramp and have some hi-res stuff, never encountered a gap problem.
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      01-02-2015, 05:52 PM   #33
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Excellent post notbob. Cheers
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      01-03-2015, 03:13 AM   #34
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Thanks, notbob, then renaming is the answer!
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      01-03-2015, 04:21 AM   #35
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Playlists not found

Hi again, I spoke too soon. Everything works (tags, album art, etc.) except for playlists...

I just don't understand why! I've tested it creating playlists from iTunes, manually, and using an app called iTunes Export, and on a small scale with just a few test playlists, it has worked well on both a smaller drive and the 256 GB drive I want to use. However, when I do the large-scale copy of the whole library, just the same way as during testing, the playlist menu in the car says No Entries.

Any ideas why this happens?
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      01-06-2015, 01:26 AM   #36
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Struggling with indexing and playlists...

Hi guys,

Don't know if I'm the only one having these issues, but I am truly struggling to get the USB drive solution to work as a replacement for my randomly freezing iPod Classis. Any advice would be much appreciated!

The setup: WD 250 GB drive, about 15,000 songs in the music library, m3u playlists exported from iTunes and paths corrected, music copied from the iTunes media folder using the artist/album structure.

When connecting the drive in the 525, no tag information is visible under Search (all grayed out except for Search Folders), but iDrive starts indexing the drive. After a while, the search fields become available, but no matter which I choose, after some pause, the only entry that shows up is Various (Artist, Album, Genre, etc.). From previous tests with only a smaller portion of the library, I think I have understood that this means the drive is still being indexed. After 2-3 hours of driving over several days, the search options finally start showing lists of artists, albums, etc., but still only No Entries for playlists. I also notice that if I choose Titles under Search, a good number (perhaps 100+) tracks are listed at the beginning as "._Title", followed by the rest of the titles, but these in the format of the file name (01 Title, 02 Title, etc.). At the tests with fewer tracks, I came to a point where all titles were listed using the proper tag title, not the file name and no ._Title tracks. This seems to indicate that indexing is not complete, but I see no hope that it ever will be, after so long.

Looking at the tracks that are listed as ._Title, for some reason, poor old David Bowie seems to be singled out, along with some other artists. I see no common trait in these files, they are both mp3, aac, and purchased aac, and they all play perfectly well i iTunes.

Any insights that could help me?
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      01-06-2015, 04:40 AM   #37
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Quote:
Originally Posted by bjornand1 View Post
Hi guys,

Don't know if I'm the only one having these issues, but I am truly struggling to get the USB drive solution to work as a replacement for my randomly freezing iPod Classis. Any advice would be much appreciated!

The setup: WD 250 GB drive, about 15,000 songs in the music library, m3u playlists exported from iTunes and paths corrected, music copied from the iTunes media folder using the artist/album structure.

When connecting the drive in the 525, no tag information is visible under Search (all grayed out except for Search Folders), but iDrive starts indexing the drive. After a while, the search fields become available, but no matter which I choose, after some pause, the only entry that shows up is Various (Artist, Album, Genre, etc.). From previous tests with only a smaller portion of the library, I think I have understood that this means the drive is still being indexed. After 2-3 hours of driving over several days, the search options finally start showing lists of artists, albums, etc., but still only No Entries for playlists. I also notice that if I choose Titles under Search, a good number (perhaps 100+) tracks are listed at the beginning as "._Title", followed by the rest of the titles, but these in the format of the file name (01 Title, 02 Title, etc.). At the tests with fewer tracks, I came to a point where all titles were listed using the proper tag title, not the file name and no ._Title tracks. This seems to indicate that indexing is not complete, but I see no hope that it ever will be, after so long.

Looking at the tracks that are listed as ._Title, for some reason, poor old David Bowie seems to be singled out, along with some other artists. I see no common trait in these files, they are both mp3, aac, and purchased aac, and they all play perfectly well i iTunes.

Any insights that could help me?
OK, first thing is have all the ID3 tags been edited correctly? I don't edit tags in itunes as not all tags map across and it appears to save - I would make sure using a 3rd party app that all the tags have worked. If the tags are all over the place for ID3's iDrive could be having issues trying to index consistently.

Second, with the ._Title it sounds like you have lots of hidden files it is trying to index - presuming you are doing this on a mac and that is where they have come from. The files starting with . are used by to store metadata and are hidden by unix OS's, but show on windows, and I presume idrive. If you are doing this on a mac, or the files have come from a mac then the files starting with . need stripping out.

Next issue could be the drive is not fast enough, I'm not sure what drive you are using but officially I don't think HDD's are supported. Older drives will have both a slow drive and slow interface, test with a known fast drive and see if that speeds things up.

I have a 1TB drive, with a USB3 interface, I think the car is USB2 only but the drive is quite fast so seems to have a reasonable USB2 interface too.

Final thing is do you have pro Media? All the features work with Pro Nav, and should also work with other systems with EBT to get artwork etc. However I only have ProMedia and can't test on all systems.

Start with a single album on a clean drive and 100% correct ID3 tags and make sure that works and can search on. Something is making the indexing fall over, so take the size variable out and start from there.

Just to add I did a complete new copy of my drive, new playlists etc. The car re-indexed everything again, and it took about 10 - 15 mins for the whole drive to index and it was all searchable, so not sure why your system is taking so long
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      01-06-2015, 07:26 AM   #38
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Thanks for many valuable suggestions, NotBob!

My problems might be caused by a combination of the issues you mention:

- Tags, the small-scale testing I did seemed to get both tag data and artwork right straight out of iTunes (on a Mac), but perhaps the tag quality varies across the library?
- Hidden files, this seems right, when browsing folders in iDrive, folders with such ._ files have two versions, one proper and one ._. This seems to suggest that there are hidden files from the Mac
- HDD speed, this is a rather old WD drive so this could certainly be an issue. It handles a small-scale test well enough, but with 15,000 tracks it could be too slow. Do you know drives (above 150 GB) that seem to work well, even SSDs?
- The car has the "highest" iDrive (I think it's called Navi Professional)
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      01-06-2015, 11:21 AM   #39
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Quote:
Originally Posted by bjornand1 View Post
Thanks for many valuable suggestions, NotBob!

My problems might be caused by a combination of the issues you mention:

- Tags, the small-scale testing I did seemed to get both tag data and artwork right straight out of iTunes (on a Mac), but perhaps the tag quality varies across the library?
- Hidden files, this seems right, when browsing folders in iDrive, folders with such ._ files have two versions, one proper and one ._. This seems to suggest that there are hidden files from the Mac
- HDD speed, this is a rather old WD drive so this could certainly be an issue. It handles a small-scale test well enough, but with 15,000 tracks it could be too slow. Do you know drives (above 150 GB) that seem to work well, even SSDs?
- The car has the "highest" iDrive (I think it's called Navi Professional)
- I would question the tagging from itunes, it may be fine nowadays but a few years ago it was pretty inconsistent - even today the way it adds album art does not extract properly through metadata. Try tagr if you don't have a windows instance

- Hidden files - just use the command
dot_clean /path/folder
in terminal

- HDD - I use a Seagate STDR1000200, it works well but I am sure there are faster out there. Fastest would probably a USB disc caddy with an SSD. The other issue you might be facing if it's an older drive is not enough power, I think the power available from the USB socket in the car is only 1amp, which may struggle to power an older drive.
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      01-07-2015, 01:43 PM   #40
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Sorry for sounding silly, but is the benefit of doing it this way to have a bigger catalogue of music which you can easily move to a new car? I'm just trying to figure out what would be best for me, an external drive or copying my music to the internal hard drive.
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      01-07-2015, 03:34 PM   #41
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Ahmed_uk View Post
Sorry for sounding silly, but is the benefit of doing it this way to have a bigger catalogue of music which you can easily move to a new car? I'm just trying to figure out what would be best for me, an external drive or copying my music to the internal hard drive.
Convenience and storage space really. All my files are already on my network storage and had previously done the work tagging so no extra work. Also my library is big due to the number of files and the size I rip at.

Ripping to the car is easy for one, but I wouldn't want to sit there with hundreds of CDs, and based on what I've seen the grace note database so track names etc will likely be incomplete.

I just can't see an advantage of using the internal drive for my situation, but if I didn't have the digital files I may see different...
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      01-07-2015, 05:30 PM   #42
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Is there any delay in browsing/playing files on car startup with the library your size from the HD?
I remember a few years ago when trying to pull off the same thing with around 2k tracks on my Alpine headunit was a headache, it would take about 20 seconds just to dock (scan) the files on the drive and that was with just with a sample of my whole library lol.

I think when you have a library bigger than 1k songs and loads of playlists its just easier to use iTunes + iPod as everything is stored in its own library database which most cars can read.
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      01-13-2015, 04:29 AM   #43
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iTunes tags

Hi, again,

Still waiting for my faster USB drive, but I have started looking into the iTunes tags. And you were right, notbob, when opening the library in mp3tagger, I see lots of issues:

- Missing tag info
- Missing cover art
- !BAD tags

In fear of messing up the iTunes library (which I use for other purposes), I am hesitant to manipulate the track files with a different editor. But I guess I can use mp3tagger to detect tracks with tag problems, try to correct in iTunes, and refresh to see if that fixed it? Any experience with this?

Playing around with a few tracks seems to indicate that converting the id3 tag, re-pasting cover art, etc. seems to help...
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      01-13-2015, 04:32 AM   #44
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Vimy, I would prefer sticking exclusively to iTunes and iPod!

My problem is I need an iPod Classic to fit the whole library, and despite having tried every advice covered in various forums, it still freezes frequently and must be restarted. The only fix seems to be using the BMW Y-cable (which despite some provocation has not caused freezing), but then I lose cover art, the sound quality is poorer, and the response times in presenting tag data seems slower.
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