[TonyS]

Originally Posted by Ahmed_uk

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.

The implementation of the internal drive is really poor, and it's incredibly difficult to make simple changes to your music collection. If you're going to put your music on it and never touch it again it's fine, but otherwise stick to USB. The only plus point I've found with the internal drive is that you can select tracks by voice command, but in reality who cares.

[bjornand1]

Hi again,

I'm trying to move this USB drive solution forward, but as I make some progress, new questions/issues arise...

USB Drive: I've bought a new fast Seagate drive, so at least any speed issues should be eliminated

Hidden files: After loading the new drive with some music, I again found that the car would not complete the indexing, and with these "._xxxxx" tracks appearing under Browse Folders. Looking at the drive connected to my Mac (using Windows in Fusion) I found hundreds of these hidden files. The strange thing is; there are no such files in the Music folder of the iTunes library, so they seem to be generated when copying music files to the drive. They also seem to be generated only for AAC files; perhaps it's the Mac's way of somehow ensuring that such files can be played by other OS/apps?

Indexing not completing: However, even after deleting these hidden files (and the DS Store files), iDrive seems to get stuck in the indexing. No matter which Search category I use, no list is generated, it just says Various Genres, Various Artists, Various Albums, etc. If I use Browse Folders to look inside the Music folder, the tracks are listed using their file names (01 Title, etc.), and if I play a track, the info screen (although showing the artwork) also says Various Artist, Various Album.

So this leads me to thinking that perhaps it is tag issues that cause the incomplete indexing? As suggested by Not Bob, my iTunes library does seem to have hundreds of files that when opened in mp3Tag clearly have problems. I've found that the problems materialize in three different ways:

1. mp3Tag in the Tag column says "ID3v1 (ID3v1 !BAD ID2v2)" or some other combination (v2, v3, etc.)
2. The Tag column simply says "(!BAD ID3v3)" or v2, v4
3. The Tag Columns is just empty, and this seems to affect m4a files

I can't find any pattern from viewing the files/tags in iTunes as to which files have issues in mp3Tag (and the funny thing is that when I load the same library in the Mac app tagr, everything seems fine except a dozen of tracks with missing artwork). It will take very much work fixing all these tags (it seems following other posts' approach of converting the ID3 tag first to None, then to v3 or v4, and re-pasting artwork works, when reloading the files in mp3Tag, they have been corrected), so before I take on this work it would be useful to have an indication whether the indexing is caused by these tag issues.

Would anyone have an idea about this?

[bjornand1]

I realize I'm rambling on about my problem-solving process, but perhaps it might help somebody else with similar problems...

First of all, I've realized that my beloved BMW is actually cleverer than I thought! Whereas the Windows mp3Tag program deems 100s of iTunes tracks to have bad or missing tag data, the Mac-based tagr found only a dozen tracks with problems. After carefully testing lots of the files mp3Tag is unable to read properly, I am glad to say that iDrive has no problems with these.

I'd really like to understand what causes different programs/devices to read tags so differently, but at least it makes my job of tag correcting much smaller.

I've also determined that starting out with a freshly formatted USB drive and gradually loading more music, iDrive does finish indexing and much seems to work well. But, even though the different search categories now show Artists, Albums, etc., I still get that pesky "Various" in the list. When I look at the tracks in this category, they are a new issue: Lots of files titles "$" + 5 cap letters that make no sense. Connecting the drive to a computer, they don't show up, so I have no idea what these are.

Next step, reformat the drive and try a full-scale transfer of the library and playlists...

[bjornand1]

OK, so forget my enthusiastic statement about clever BMW...

After moving on to full-scale implementation of the whole 15k track library, I am back to square one. During two days of driving to and from work plus addition time in the car, perhaps 1.5 hours altogether, it seems to have indexed about 300 songs, the rest appear either as file name (and then only showing Various Artists, Various Albums if played) or for the most part as $RXBUW8N2 and similar (giving the message cannot play track).

Previously, Not Bob suggested several possible causes for my problems, but I believe most of those have been eliminated:

- Slow USB drive, a new and fast Seagate has been acquired
- Complex file structure, I now have all tracks in a flat structure at the root of the drive
- Bad tags, where I have confirmed through small-scale testing that the car can read all types of files/tags that I have and that they all appear fine in the program tagr
- Hidden files, I have cleaned out all of those, us DS Store Remover to clean those, and I rename the drive between tests to force indexing

With a small portion of the library, everything seems to be fine, but not when "going live" with the whole thing. I really don't understand how the car is set up in terms of handling USB drives, but perhaps someone knows:

- Will it index only what it can do on the first drive after connecting the drive? Meaning I can't drive to work for 15 minutes and then have it resume the indexing going back home afterwards?
- When first connecting the drive, I can only search folders and it starts playing the first song. Gradually, the search categories open up, and I've been poking around to see what happens. Perhaps it is best to leave it alone at this stage?

Frustrated... I got an original BMW Y Cable, and so far I've not been able to provoke iPod freeze so it is tempting to just stick with that. But the sound is poorer, there is no artwork, and the response in presenting metadata when changing songs is very slow.

[edz_f06]

Not sure how I missed this thread before but thanks to not bob for the info - I've now finally got my mp3 collection to play on my poverty spec idrive

[bjornand1]

OK, so I genuinely tried the iPod with the Y cable, but the sound is horrible and there's no artwork... I guess I'm not ready to give up my attempts at USB drive music.

I've been playing around more, and new issues keep popping up:

- I'm still waiting for the BMW to fully index the USB drive; I realize this will take weeks as more artists/albums/etc. slowly emerge when revealing the lists under the different search categories
- One puzzling issue is that if I select all titles and playback, under sequential play, at this stage about 12,000 out of 15,000 tracks show up as various artists/various albums and the file name as track title (I guess the 3,000 displaying proper metadata are the ones that have been indexed by now). However, if I switch to random play, absolutely all tracks are shown with the correct metadata, even if during search they are placed under various in the search lists. Unfathomable to me...
- Covers are a different issue. While waiting for indexing to complete, I've been going through the tracks in all titles mode, and I see that perhaps around 10% of the songs do not show cover art. I've been playing around with these on my Mac, replacing the cover art by various means (paste a new one, add artwork and select jpg file, convert id3 tag to none, then 2.3 or 2.4 and add artwork, etc.) for both mp3 and aac files. I then bring these to to the car on a small flash drive, and there is no pattern. Some now show artwork, others have been "fixed" in several ways and despite showing art in iTunes, Finder, tagr, and mp3tag, the car simply won't read it.
- Someone suggested the car has some kind of RAM cache of sings played and will use the metadata stored instead of what's actually on the drive. To some extent, this sounds plausible since I can connect a drive that has not been renamed and the car will still play songs that are no longer on the disk. Does anyone know if this could be the case? And if so, how to wipe that cache?

Again, any help would be much appreciated!

[TonyS]

Originally Posted by bjornand1

OK, so I genuinely tried the iPod with the Y cable, but the sound is horrible and there's no artwork... I guess I'm not ready to give up my attempts at USB drive music.

I've been playing around more, and new issues keep popping up:

- I'm still waiting for the BMW to fully index the USB drive; I realize this will take weeks as more artists/albums/etc. slowly emerge when revealing the lists under the different search categories
- One puzzling issue is that if I select all titles and playback, under sequential play, at this stage about 12,000 out of 15,000 tracks show up as various artists/various albums and the file name as track title (I guess the 3,000 displaying proper metadata are the ones that have been indexed by now). However, if I switch to random play, absolutely all tracks are shown with the correct metadata, even if during search they are placed under various in the search lists. Unfathomable to me...
- Covers are a different issue. While waiting for indexing to complete, I've been going through the tracks in all titles mode, and I see that perhaps around 10% of the songs do not show cover art. I've been playing around with these on my Mac, replacing the cover art by various means (paste a new one, add artwork and select jpg file, convert id3 tag to none, then 2.3 or 2.4 and add artwork, etc.) for both mp3 and aac files. I then bring these to to the car on a small flash drive, and there is no pattern. Some now show artwork, others have been "fixed" in several ways and despite showing art in iTunes, Finder, tagr, and mp3tag, the car simply won't read it.
- Someone suggested the car has some kind of RAM cache of sings played and will use the metadata stored instead of what's actually on the drive. To some extent, this sounds plausible since I can connect a drive that has not been renamed and the car will still play songs that are no longer on the disk. Does anyone know if this could be the case? And if so, how to wipe that cache?

Again, any help would be much appreciated!

I have around 4,000 mp3 files on a 32GB USB stick (ok, not nearly as many as you), but I find it takes just seconds to re-index if I remove the stick, add some files, and reinsert it.

Here are some other suggestions I can think of that I would try in your position to attempt to isolate the problem (and forgive me if you've tried these already) :-

- Are you absolutely sure that there aren't any hidden files on the drive? You should *only* have .MP3 and .M3U files present, nothing else.

- Try temporarily removing the playlists (.M3U) just in case there is a problem with the file paths and it's confusing the iDrive.

- Can you see the correct metadata (including the embedded image) if you check the .MP3 files (I use MediaMonkey for updating metadata tags and finding and embedding cover art, but there are loads of utilities that will do it)?

- Just in case it's some incompatibility with your hard disk, have you tried copying a few thousand of the files to a large USB stick and trying that?

[bjornand1]

Hi, Tony,

Thanks for these suggestions! And the fact that I hear many people who have no problems with USBs and where indexing is fast is what motivates to keep going.

As for your suggestions:

- In the beginning of my experimentations, there were hidden files that caused trouble. I now use either of the apps Playlist Export or Blue Harvest to clean the drive so this issue has been eliminated
- When testing for cover art, I only copy the music files, no playlists
- The correct embedded metadata and cover show up in iTunes, the tag editing apps of tagr and mp3data, as well as file info/icons in Finder
- I have been gradually increasing the number of tracks copied to a USB flash drive to test the indexing time. With only a couple of hundred, it is quite fast, with a few thousand it takes much longer, and with 15,000 it seems unable to complete the process

[TonyS]

Hmm, not sure what else to suggest then. I'm a Windows guy and know nothing about Macs.

Just in case it's relevant, here's how I handle things...

I keep an exact copy of the USB stick on my Windows PC - this also means that if the USB stick fails/breaks/etc I have a backup. I copy any new files that I want in the car into this folder structure on the PC. When I want to update the USB stick I mount it as a drive under Windows and then use a file syncing app (in my case the unbelievably amazingly useful Beyond Compare) to update the USB stick with the new files. There's no iTunes or anything else involved, just simple file copying, so I know I'm just getting the files I've specified copied across.

If it was me and I had a friend with a Windows machine I'd try starting from scratch again and putting a few thousand files on a USB stick from Windows. I know it shouldn't make any difference, but hey, I'm a software engineer and I learnt long ago not to assume anything but to just keep removing possible causes until it starts working

On the other hand, it may some limitation of the iDrive software with that many files, but I'm sure there are other people around with similar numbers of files.

Either way, good luck with it.

[bjornand1]

I agree, never assume!

I run Windows in Parallels, so I could test from a pure Windows perspective.

I am still tempted to believe this is somehow related to the car's memory used for storing the indexing information. What I've learnt from others in various forums is that in order to have a disk synced with new files get reindexed in the car, it must be renamed. This means the whole disk is indexed from scratch by iDrive.

Some say the car has memory space for a certain number of USB drives and tracks, so slow indexing could be caused by a full memory (that might be deleting chunks at the time to free up space for the on-going indexing process)?

[TonyS]

You may be right about the memory issue. I guess the only way to prove that is to do what you've been doing, gradually increase the number of files and see what happens. If it's a memory issue I'd expect to see a sudden step change in indexing time when you hit the memory limit.

Sudden thought - you are formatting the USB drive with FAT32, aren't you?

I'm not saying you're wrong, but I've not come across the "rename the disk to get it to reindex" issue before. Whenever I've updated my USB stick the new files are automatically picked up when I plug it back in. Just out of interest I might try putting all my stuff on another USB stick and plugging that in to see how long it takes.

[bjornand1]

FAT32, yes!

Rename to reindex has been mentioned quite a few places, and I see it myself in my car; if I put new music on a drive I'm testing and don't rename it, the new tracks will not show up when using metadata to browse the songs (but they do in folder view, of course).

[TonyS]

Right, I've just been out to the car with a new USB stick with a copy of all my files, and on plugging it in the files are visible straight away in folder view, but exactly as you say there initially appears to be no metadata as all the metadata search options are greyed out. Probably I've not noticed before as I normally use the folder view as I have my top level folders as the artist name, which is what I normally use.

Interestingly the led on the USB stick flashes even though I'm not playing anything, so it is working away presumably indexing. I left it for a few minutes and it was still going but there was still no metadata in iDrive. Interestingly, even when I turned off the ignition and even locked the car the led was still flashing, so it looks like it's still reading data even with everything off, which not what I'd expect.

The other strange thing is that all of the metadata is present on my original USB stick. The latest updates to it were about a month ago, so it looks like it's got the new metadata. Who knows how long it took though.

[bjornand1]

Thanks for going to the trouble of testing it, Tony! I think iDrive keeps processing the drive for up to 15 minutes after switching off the ignition...

[TonyS]

Ah, ok. As long as it does eventually switch off.

[bjornand1]

OK, lack of replies probably means you've all figured this out or don't experience the same issues as I do... At least for my own sanity during this trouble shooting process, I'll keep posting!

Some progress:

- After talking to my local BMW dealer, I've realized (confirmed through testing) that a USB drive doesn't have to be renamed for the car to update its index. However, you might have to search folders and start a track that has been copied to the drive since it was indexed to trigger the updating.

All my issues regarding drives that never seem to complete indexing and missing cover art seems more and more certainly to be down to the car's RAM. As the instruction manual says (had I read previously? no...), the car can store 4 USB drives and up to 36,000 tracks before it starts deleting the oldest entries. Through all my testing, I've clearly filled the memory to the rim, and according to the dealer, indexing becomes sluggish when the process both deletes and stores new entries. Sadly, he didn't know of a way to clear the memory...

Any ideas how to do this would be much appreciated!

As for missing cover art, the explanation is probably that the car will use the metadata stored in the memory, even though the track's data on the drive has been updated. Again, the dealer couldn't advise on how to change this.

Finally, I notice that in contrast to my iPod, the car doesn't seem to read the tag data about sort artist, thus listing solo artists by their first name rather than last. Does anyone know if this can be changed in any way?

[TonyS]

Your paragraph about not needing to rename explains why I've not encountered the problem when adding new albums.

Personally, I rarely use the metadata tags in the car, I normally just choose by folder, as I have the folders set up as Artist/Album/Tracks. That's why I had a hard job initially understanding what your problem was until I tried it for myself with a new USB stick. Maybe others do the same?

Can't advise about clearing out the memory, other than possibly taking out the iDrive and disconnecting it for a while, or disconnecting the car battery (although I've heard this can cause other issues). You can reset the iDrive by holding down the radio on/off switch for 30 seconds, but I doubt this would clear it out.

The multimedia implementation on iDrive is flawed in many ways as I've mentioned before. It's almost as if they got the experienced software designers to work on the nav software and gave the multimedia stuff to a graduate (no offence to graduates, but I'm going from several personal experiences).

I hope you get it all sorted, but I have a feeling you may just to settle for having less music in the car.

[djcowlin]

Thanks for this. I'm highly tempted to go down this route as the compatibility problems with iOS 8 STILL aren't fixed. BMW dealer has just told me that Apple are dragging their feet in releasing the necessary software to BMW, without which they can't update the Pro Nav software...

[bjornand1]

Hi,

Quiet from me for a few weeks... I've working on getting everything to work, and I believe I have solved most issues; I've partially loaded the USB drive with a couple of thousand tracks at the time and let the indexing complete, I am almost through fixing missing covers (although I still see no pattern in which tracks have missing artwork), and strange hidden files are removed using Blue Harvest.

However, out of a total of about 50 playlists (exported using Playlist Export), only about 25 show up. For a long while, only about 24 appeared, but when I was about to give up and realize that no more were picked up by iDrive, one additional playlist appeared. After that, however, no more!

I've tried renaming, deleting and adding again, creating new ones, etc., but it seems iDrive stopped monitoring for changes in playlists. Any ideas how to get the remaining ones recognized?

[bjornand1]

Hi, I've been quiet for some weeks ago now, having spent the time going through the whole library and fixing tracks where artwork did not display. So now I'm at a stage where my 500 GB USB drive works almost perfectly in the car, with appr. 15,000 tracks and all metadata/album art having been indexed.

My only remaining problem is that iDrive does not seem to pick up new playlists. I have about 50 that I'd like to have available, but i Drive only shows 28. They were all transferred to the USB drive using I have tried Playlist Export, are 100% certainly correct in terms of path, type of \, etc. Still, after gradually detecting and presenting the playlists, this has stopped at 28. I have since tried to delete some of these 28, to test whether there is a finite memory for playlists, but while these disappear (showing that iDrive does som updating), no new ones have appeared. I have also tried creating new playlists, exporting them from iTunes using Doubletwist, etc., but to no avail.

Any ideas what could be causing this?

[Spoonhead]

After no problems with my USB stick and 8,200 tracks, I'm now experiencing an intermittent issue in that when returning to the car, the indexing is lost, and it goes back to only finding the very first folder of one album, and I can then only play those 11 tracks. After about 2-3 minutes, the full number of tracks re-appear, and I can then click the search button, play all tracks and switch the random option back on.

Do you think iDrive has a problem with the number of tracks, or perhaps a corrupt file is causing a problem.

its becoming a pain, and I'm seriously thinking of going back to 64gb iPod touch.

[bjornand1]

I had had this happen once to my USB drive (and it took days before everything has been reindexed), but I think that was caused by my playing around with other USB sticks. You leave it plugged in when leaving the car?

I don't have much experience with corrupt files, but I do suspect that iDrive is not the best system to deal with large numbers of tracks. I have close to 15,000 tracks and as I've posted above, it seems somehow the playlist memory is full.