[Mace]

Well, got my 32GB Corsair in the mail today. Before anyone says "SEARCH", I'll let you know I already have but things are a bit confusing for a computer dunce like myself so I'm looking for a little straight forward advice regarding how to structure the files on this. I pick up my car in Atlanta in July and would like to have this thing loaded so I can have the music on my drive home.

What I'd like to be able to do is easily search for artists and play complete albums. For instance, I'd like to see Alan Parson's Project and select the album "Eye in the Sky". On the other hand, I'd like to be able to select a Genre like Jazz and randomly play all the Jazz albums I have. How should I organize my thumb drive to do this?

I know I can drag all music files onto the drive in one large chunk with no folders or playlists. Some have said the car will take quite a bit of time indexing but then I can sort by Artist and Genre but I don't see how I can select an album.

If I create folders, do I label the first one "Alan Parson's Project" and then put folders with each entire album inside that OR do I create individual playlists for each album with the album name? Can I do both?

Anyway, thanks for your help in advance.

[tintivilus]

Originally Posted by Mace

I know I can drag all music files onto the drive in one large chunk with no folders or playlists. Some have said the car will take quite a bit of time indexing but then I can sort by Artist and Genre but I don't see how I can select an album.

You can search by Album, too, but not Artist, then Album (or "Album by Artist" in iTunes terms) like you seem to want.

Originally Posted by Mace

If I create folders, do I label the first one "Alan Parson's Project" and then put folders with each entire album inside that OR do I create individual playlists for each album with the album name? Can I do both?

Yes. I'd do the former (folders) rather than playlists but either should work. That's how iTunes organizes your collection, btw, so you can just copy whole artist trees from the iTunes library if that's your thing.

Then you can still use the "genre" option, assuming all your files are tagged with reasonable metadata.

[I335]

My son simply copied a portion of his iPod music to a thumb drive for me and while the music files looked right on his Mac it appeared that I had 2 of each song on the screen in the car - and they all played fine. I haven't figured this out yet either...

[tintivilus]

That'll only work if the files on the iPod can be played by the car. MP3, maybe AAC, and I think wav -- but the iPod supports more file formats than 6FL does so it's not always useful.

[Sinister Stairs]

I finally got around to trying a USB stick -- I reformatted the whole thing as a FAT32 volume, and have them structured like:

/Genre1
/Genre1/Artist1
/Genre1/Artist1/Album1
/Genre1/Artist1/Album2
/Genre1/Artist2
/Genre1/Artist2/Album1
/Genre1/Artist2/Album2
/Genre2

but I can only navigate by directory structure; I haven't found how to play by Genre or Artist.

Am I doing something wrong, or did I miss an option in the iDrive menus? And what playlist format should I use if I want to create them, or where should I put the files?

Thanks in advance

[tintivilus]

Originally Posted by Sinister Stairs

but I can only navigate by directory structure; I haven't found how to play by Genre or Artist.

Your files aren't tagged with metadata in a format that the car can parse. I'm pretty sure you won't get the artist/album/etc menus if the ccc doesn't find any artists/albums/etc.

[drvai]

Originally Posted by tintivilus

Your files aren't tagged with metadata in a format that the car can parse. I'm pretty sure you won't get the artist/album/etc menus if the ccc doesn't find any artists/albums/etc.

So what's the format that the iDrive can read?

I have tried and tried to make all the songs readable with their respective ID, but I can´t.

I reencoded all my songs with iTunes and that kind of helped, but I still have song that the iDrive don't recognize and just puts them in the "various artists"

[Winston1961]

You have to remove Albumart. When there is too much information in the Td tag the BMW can't read the information.

[bsd107]

Originally Posted by Winston1961

You have to remove Albumart. When there is too much information in the Td tag the BMW can't read the information.

That's terrible.

1) It's too bad that iDrive doesn't read and USE the album art on-screen.

2) This will make it much harder to manage a song library - one copy on the computer WITH album art, and another copy for the car without.....

[Winston1961]

Originally Posted by bsd107

That's terrible.

1) It's too bad that iDrive doesn't read and USE the album art on-screen.

2) This will make it much harder to manage a song library - one copy on the computer WITH album art, and another copy for the car without.....

I agree with you.

This is what i found on the forum:
Some mp3 track's title information are not shown, only the file names. Some investigation showed that this happens when the ID3V2 tag info is larger than approx. 32 KByte. This can happen when you make use of album cover art in ID3 tags

[bsd107]

Originally Posted by Winston1961

I agree with you.

This is what i found on the forum:
Some mp3 track's title information are not shown, only the file names. Some investigation showed that this happens when the ID3V2 tag info is larger than approx. 32 KByte. This can happen when you make use of album cover art in ID3 tags

Hopefully this will be improved with the new iDrive on the 2009's, but we'll see.... There is certainly no mention of album cover art support, but maybe the car will be able to read larger ID3V2 tag info....