[bsd107]

Will the new Nav system play Apple Lossless Codec or Windows Media Lossless files, either directly off of USB or after download the the iDrive hard disc?

[MB330]

Originally Posted by rob72

What I am wondering is how it will handle map updates.

From what I heard and read - this will be done at your local BMW service department. And probably not for free.

[rob72]

Originally Posted by MB330

From what I heard and read - this will be done at your local BMW service department. And probably not for free.

Yes I read something about that as well, but I simply cannot believe that is the only way to install a new map. There must be a way for end-users to install map updates without having the dealer do it for you.

[Mantis64]

Originally Posted by LionRampant

Note that the USB port in the armrest is not standard equipment--it is included only in cars with the 6FL iPod/USB Adapter option or the dealer-installed USB adapter. If you order a car without the 6FL option, you only get the USB connection in the glovebox, and that seemingly cannot be used to play music directly.

--LR

Just asked my dealer to switch the extra USB ports (6FL) for heated seats, since I will only be playing music from the internal HD. He told me that the standard USB port is a lot slower than the one you get with the 6FL option. That seems very strange to me, can anyone confirm this?

[bennysky]

Hi, thanks a lot for the write-up. Can I ask 2 questions?

1. Does it support Chinese?
2. If you switch off the display, is it totally switched off or same as the old one (still have some light)?

Thanks,
Benny

[sdiver68]

Lion, you are the man!

I just took delivery of my 09 e93 335i ZSP and mused it would take me several hours to program everything next weekend. With this extremely sweet overview, I figure I'm 1/2 there!

[LionRampant]

Originally Posted by bsd107

PLEASE tell me what type of USB cable should come with the car when equipped with 6FL. I'm about to pick my E90 LCI and want to make sure they give me the right cable. Thanks!

Sorry for the delay...took a trip this weekend in my E90 and was out of forum range.

If you have both iDrive and the iPod/USB adapter, you should receive two cables. The first, commonly referenced here as a Y-cable, has an iPod dock connector on one end, and a split to a USB plug and a stereo miniplug on the other. These two connections are made to the USB and AUX ports in the center armrest/console. Some have reported that unscrupulous dealers claim that the Y-cable is not included with the 6FL option and is an extra charge--this is not the case. The option includes the cable, so make sure you get it.

The iDrive system comes with a 1.5' USB extension cable--a female USB connection on one end and a male USB plug on the other. This cable is important due to the location of the iDrive's USB connection for music upload, which is recessed quite a bit in the glovebox. Some drives and form factors may have difficulty plugging straight into the recessed connection, and so they provide an extension to make that easier to do.

Hope you're enjoying the new ride!

--LR

[LionRampant]

Originally Posted by bsd107

Will the new Nav system play Apple Lossless Codec or Windows Media Lossless files, either directly off of USB or after download the the iDrive hard disc?

It will not, in either case.

Also, be careful when importing music to the internal Music Collection as well. If you have lossless files on your drive when you import (bear in mind that an import grabs all the files on the drive), they will be brought over to the Music Collection but will not be playable. The system doesn't handle unplayable files in the Music Collection terribly gracefully, and in order to get rid of the ones I imported as a test today, I had to delete the whole Music Collection and start over.

--LR

[LionRampant]

Originally Posted by Mantis64

Just asked my dealer to switch the extra USB ports (6FL) for heated seats, since I will only be playing music from the internal HD. He told me that the standard USB port is a lot slower than the one you get with the 6FL option. That seems very strange to me, can anyone confirm this?

The music import from the glovebox USB port seems more dependent on the speed of the device you plug into it than internally limited. A USB hard drive allowed much quicker import of music than a slow USB flash drive. Note that you cannot play music directly from the port in the glovebox--the music must be imported into the Music Collection, which is a complete-drive import and can take some time.

--LR

[Rotary Rasp]

Originally Posted by LionRampant

The music import from the glovebox USB port seems more dependent on the speed of the device you plug into it than internally limited. A USB hard drive allowed much quicker import of music than a slow USB flash drive. Note that you cannot play music directly from the port in the glovebox--the music must be imported into the Music Collection, which is a complete-drive import and can take some time.

--LR

Does that mean that if you have 256kbs mp3s the system will copy them onto the hard drive at that same bit rate.

I thought the system used 128kbs, or is that for CD ripping only?

[bsd107]

Originally Posted by LionRampant

[The video playback of the DVD is tied to the parking brake. I was in the midst of a detail on the car when I tested earlier, and didn't actually check to see what happened while moving. When the parking brake is released, the video is replaced by the message "For your safety, video only while parked." The audio continues, however, which is interesting.

Before you go modifying the parking brake, keep in mind that the manual says (I'm paraphrasing):

- In some countries, DVDs cannot be viewed AT ALL
- In some countries, DVDs cannot be viewed unless the parking brake is activated
- In ALL countries, the screen is blanked after the car exceeds 2mph.

So, even if the parking brake feature is bypassed, the screen will blank when the car exceed 2mph.

I previously had a US E39, and added the BMW TV Tuner to the car. This did not have a parking brake link (as it was not considered to be a US option), but it did blank once the car exceeded 2mph. There was a way to hack this in the TV tuner itself (NAVTV.com got their start by selling this service for a few hundred bucks), but I never did this.

[bsd107]

Originally Posted by LionRampant

Once it started indexing, I was able to access and play what it had found so far. A folder structure is provided for you to navigate, with the music appearing within the folders you set up on the drive just as with a USB flash drive. The indexing is apparently not cached by the system; it took as long to come up the second time I plugged it in as the first. This is not unexpected--if the structure of the drive was cached tightly, iDrive would run into problems if that structure was changed.
--LR

Actually, this is surprising. According to the manual, the car stores the index for USB devices on it's hard drive, so that once the index is created it should already be available the next time you connect. The car will remember the index of up to four USB devices, and if you connect a fifth USB device, it will overwrite the first index, etc.

I think the above only applies to the 6FL connector - where you perhaps connecting to the glove-box USB part when you found it not caching the index?

[bsd107]

Originally Posted by LionRampant

I can confirm that a bus-powered USB hard drive functions both as an audio source for live play as well as for import into the onboard Music Collection. There are a few caveats, however. The drive must be formatted as FAT32; the system apparently cannot read Mac-formatted (HFS+) or NTFS drives. iDrive is not terribly speedy about indexing the drive--it took well over a minute for my 60Gb USB hard drive with about 5 Gb of music to be recognized and indexed.
--LR

Interestingly, BMW states that USB Hard Drives should not be used.

There is no explaination as to why, however. Could this be power demands on the socket?

[bsd107]

Originally Posted by LionRampant

There is a USB port in the glovebox, but a drive plugged into that port is not usable directly as an audio source--the glovebox port is exclusively for music import/export. One should also note that the music import/export is not finely controllable. There is no provision to select only certain folders to import from the drive, merely a single mode that imports all song files found on the drive into the Music Collection.
--LR

BMW obviously recognizes this as something people will complain about. The manual suggests letting the car import all of the music, and then once it is on the car's hard drive you can go in and delete individual songs that you did not want copied.

This could be a long and laborious process, but at least it should work...

[bsd107]

Originally Posted by KevinO

Yes, but you only get 12GB (I think) for music. I believe music and contacts are the only things that you can upload to the hard drive.

My car claims 13GB free.

But the difference between 12GB and 13GB once you start loading the drive with files can be lost in round-off error....

[3er858]

Just to add to this, I tested what would happen if I just plugged my ipod into the USB in the glove compartment and it did download the files but the files had wierd names in weirdly named folders. You could click on the files and they would play fine. The funny thing is, when you searched for a song, it would come up and play with the correct titles and everything. I eventually downloaded all of my mp3's into the "hard drive" portion of my ipod (not using itunes) and temporarly erased all of the "itunes" music, then plugged it in to the USB port and it worked flawlessly! I hope that all made sense.

[bsd107]

Originally Posted by rob72

Also new I noted is that when you do not have the key and you press the volume button that the iDrive switches on in a limited mode. Namely you can only control some of the music/radio functions, all other functions (Navigation/Settings and such) where grayed out.

Correct, BMW calls this "radio ready mode". This is no different than sitting in an "old" car and turning the key to the accessories position so that you can listen to the radio. Other car functions require the ignition to be on, which is the same thing here.

[bsd107]

Originally Posted by rob72

Also, does the system now allow you to have more then one POI category displayed on the map simultaneously? Again the reason is because of speedcameras, right now I use the same icon for all types, and if I can have multiple POI categories displayed, each type of camera (50km, 70km, red light-only, etc) can have a different icon.

Wait a minute - some navigation databases actually include speedcameras? I've never heard of this, but this would be great....

[bsd107]

Originally Posted by Mantis64

Just asked my dealer to switch the extra USB ports (6FL) for heated seats, since I will only be playing music from the internal HD. He told me that the standard USB port is a lot slower than the one you get with the 6FL option. That seems very strange to me, can anyone confirm this?

This makes no sense. It's an "apples & oranges" comparison.

- 6FL's USB port lets you play music directly from the device ONLY.

- The iDrive USB port only lets you import music to the car's hard drive.

- There is no "standard USB port", so I don't know what the dealer is talking about.

What would be true is that if you bring some new music to the car on a USB device and want to play it, if you only have iDrive you will have to first copy the music to the car's hard drive, which will take some time. With 6FL you can instead play from the USB device directly, avoiding the downloading step.

[bsd107]

Originally Posted by LionRampant

If you have both iDrive and the iPod/USB adapter, you should receive two cables. The first, commonly referenced here as a Y-cable, has an iPod dock connector on one end, and a split to a USB plug and a stereo miniplug on the other. These two connections are made to the USB and AUX ports in the center armrest/console. Some have reported that unscrupulous dealers claim that the Y-cable is not included with the 6FL option and is an extra charge--this is not the case. The option includes the cable, so make sure you get it.

The iDrive system comes with a 1.5' USB extension cable--a female USB connection on one end and a male USB plug on the other. This cable is important due to the location of the iDrive's USB connection for music upload, which is recessed quite a bit in the glovebox. Some drives and form factors may have difficulty plugging straight into the recessed connection, and so they provide an extension to make that easier to do.
--LR

Thanks - I got both cables. As soon as I got in the car I asked "where is the iPod cable", and I then got a story about how the cable is included but it's a $60 part (I wonder if they would have tried to sell it to me if I hadn't obviously already known about it).

Thanks for describing the function of the extension cable - that's what it looked like to me but I couldn't figure out why it was included.

[bsd107]

Originally Posted by LionRampant

be careful when importing music to the internal Music Collection as well. If you have lossless files on your drive when you import (bear in mind that an import grabs all the files on the drive), they will be brought over to the Music Collection but will not be playable. The system doesn't handle unplayable files in the Music Collection terribly gracefully, and in order to get rid of the ones I imported as a test today, I had to delete the whole Music Collection and start over.

--LR

The manual claims that you can just delete individual songs that have DRM and won't play - obviously if you had trouble there must be bugs in the new iDrive (to be expected).

I did also read that while you can backup the entire Music Collection to a USB device, the entire backup is DRM protected and can only be played by restoring the backup to the car. Restoring the backup will erase the existing Music Collection.

[bsd107]

Originally Posted by Rotary Rasp

Does that mean that if you have 256kbs mp3s the system will copy them onto the hard drive at that same bit rate.

I thought the system used 128kbs, or is that for CD ripping only?

From what I had read at Bimmerfile, it's import from CD within the car that is limited to 128kbs WMA.

The manual says that the car will import MP3, ACC, WMA, and M3U playlist files from USB devices.

However, the manual also warns that bitrates above 256kbs may not play "under certain conditions". This annoys me, as I do not consider 256kps to be of sufficiently high quality to most music....

The car can supposedly play PCM files in WAV format off of CD-ROM discs.