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      11-05-2012, 01:49 AM   #8
c.cash
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Drives: 2013 328i modern line
Join Date: Oct 2012
Location: SoCal

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3 new things:

iDrive scrolling:
I let the iDrive wheel fly, and based on its behavior, I think it's supposed to be spun fast to "jump".

If you spin it medium-fast, it'll jump maybe 20-40 songs down the list. If you whip it really fast, you might get to the bottom of an 800-song list in no time. In other words, it's logarithmic, not linear... and that would seem to be a design feature.

So that's my solution -- I can't take the slow scrolling anymore, so I'm done with being cautious about it. (And I hope James Squire is right if it breaks).

USB:
This week I've been really trying to figure out how I want to go about playing songs from my iTunes collection in the car. So far I've decided that using a USB flash drive in the armrest port is the better solution.

I didn't like the USB drive sticking out precariously in the compartment -- something's going to get broken. So I bought this today:

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http://www.sandisk.com/products/usb/drives/cruzer-fit/

This thing is TI-NEEE. Don't drop it or you may never find it. But it is low profile and perfect for the storage compartment... and it's 32GB - enough for about 12 days of continuous music.

Work Flow:
"Work flow" sounds too serious for what we're talking about, but you get the idea. Initially I had gone into my iTunes > iTunes Music folder and copied artists' folders onto a USB stick.

Later I figured out that using Playlists would resolve the "stuck in a folder" issue with the HUD -- now I could see a full list. You just export .m3u files directly from iTunes and put them on the root level of the USB stick. Of course you can also go nuts with making more playlists and really break the list up.

But I was still wondering how I was going to deal with updating the USB drive as my library grew. Sounded like a hassle.

Tonight I tired something else: I just did a "select all" of songs in a playlist and dragged them from iTunes onto the stick to see what would happen. All of the songs just copied over. Now export the playlist .m3u file, and you're set. It doesn't get any easier than that.

So now you just have a list of songs that aren't in folders, which seems messy, but it's no big deal -- you can just use the Search function in the car to sort by Artist, Genre, etc. since the metadata is (should be) stored in the song files.

As a side note, the exception to this is .wav files. Although they don't normally have metadata, you *can* use them (unlike if you store them to the hard drive). You can play uncompressed, 44.1/16 bit uncompressed CD quality music from a flash drive, eliminating the need for having a bunch of CDs in the car.

At this point, I can't see why folders (that you get stuck in) would be a better solution, when you can just sort everything.

Using folders, if I added new songs to my library and wanted them in the car it would be a hassle to update the USB stick. With a playlist, you just update your "Car Playlist" in iTunes and drag the new songs onto the stick. Sounds much easier.

So that's my plan so far; I wanted to update this to save someone some time figuring this out. Feel free to shoot holes in it.

Last edited by c.cash; 11-10-2012 at 11:04 PM..
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