[ice_nyne]

Like many of you I've taken to putting my music collection on a USB thumb drive for playback. I have been very happy with the results for the most part. I have noticed that my artist/album/track#/track title tags show up every time without fail, but my album art does not always appear. I have loaded the USB drive locally on my computer and the artwork does display for those albums the CIC is not showing. And the album art is visible in the track metadata. So I wonder...could the issue reside in the mp3 tag type in use? (v3.1 vs. 3.2 vs. other). Is there an ideal mp3 tag format that our cars read, while others cause the system to read some fields and ignore others? Does anyone have insight into this?

[ice_nyne]

BTW, I found this link on the topic:

http://www.bimmerfest.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=152730

Look at post #2. It mentions ID3v1 ID3v2 being readable. But this was in 2006, don't know if any advances have been made since then.

[ice_nyne]

After a lot of trial and error, I've hit upon the cause and solution. Seems our iDrive audio decoders have issue with album art file size, and album art pixel size. The former is more important than the latter.

By trying out various sizes of both artwork file size and album art pixel size that appear in the mp3 metadata, I've found the sweet spot to be around 200kb in the artwork's file size, and 600x600 in pixel size. There are other sizes and combinations that will still appear on the idrive screen, but when the value of one goes up, the other must go down to accommodate (ex. I have several 700x700 pixel size .jpgs that have a corresponding file size of around 140kb. That seemed to work okay).

What you want to stay away from are large sizes in either category that end up choking the system - 2mb file sizes and 1000x1000 pixel sizes, for example. The music file will still play, but the artwork will not appear, and I did notice it took a little longer to load and start playing back the file.

It really helps if you have a mp3 tagging program such as Mp3 Tag, which is helpful in identifying what has art, what is missing art, the size or your artwork residing in the MP3 metadata, and if your file contains more than one piece of artwork in it (which also chokes the iDrive, btw).

As far as tag formats go, it seems ID3v2.3 is read quickly by our BMWs (I'm speaking for my 2011 3-series; YMMV). And MP3 Tag is great at converting your existing tag types to v2.3 as well.

Here are some examples after cleaning everything up:









You can see character limits are an issue in our rides. Another issue for another day. Otherwise, case closed, I think.

[Mr. Toad]

Originally Posted by ice_nyne

By trying out various sizes of both artwork file size and album art pixel size that appear in the mp3 metadata, I've found the sweet spot to be around 200kb in the artwork's file size, and 600x600 in pixel size. There are other sizes and combinations that will still appear on the idrive screen, but when the value of one goes up, the other must go down to accommodate (ex. I have several 700x700 pixel size .jpgs that have a corresponding file size of around 140kb. That seemed to work okay).

Your findings are interesting to me because I've got a 32GB USB drive in my console with more than 2,000 songs on it, and all of them have been tagged using the free MP3 Tag software. About 95 percent of my cover art JPEGs are at least 700 x 700 pixels (with some larger) and many of them are more than 200kb in size. Since I began writing all my tags with MP3 Tag, I've never had cover art not show in iDrive.

[hybrid90]

I'm not meaning to hijack this thread, but I have a couple of question. First, what CiC are you running? I also have a 2011, but a 04/10 build date so I have all iPod functionality and Bluetooth, but no Combox. I've never seen album artwork come up on my screen. I'd really like this feature, but I don't even know if my CiC is capable.
Second, how are you putting the files on the Flash Drive? What I mean is, are you putting just the .MP3 file on there or the entire folder (Artist>Album>Song.MP3)? I tried putting just the .MP3 files on and it played fine, but the organization and order were all over the place.
I'm going to take a look at the MP3 Tag program you're talking about and maybe that will help me to better understand what you're doing. IPod functionality just has too many glitches and while I have a Tune2Air in the car that I use sometimes, it also is very glitchy and I don't like using my phone that much for music unless I'm using Pandora or YouTube

[vespa]

I've found that Windows Media Player fails to play files when the album art is too big (or otherwise randomly disagreeable) so I use it to check files in question. The CIC will read pure APE, as well as ID3v1 thru v4 and I haven't found any performance improvement with various tag types so I just use pure v3 with square art under 600px/200k and it works OK. It gets sluggish with a few thousand songs on the drive though.

My CIC.C1a loses all voice recognition in nav, phone, etc. (she's happy to voice her own opinion but then she completely ignores everything I say) when I put too many songs in a M3U playlist. Also if I put too many large playlists on the USB it will only choose a random few of them to display. Lastly, it really works hard to ignore valid tags and find something invalid so that it can lump a bunch of my music under "unknown artist" so I've stripped all my files down to pure v3.

Hybrid: Album art only works with USB and you need the art to be embedded in the tag as is the modern convention, not just thrown in the folder as is the old convention.

[hybrid90]

Originally Posted by vespa

Hybrid: Album art only works with USB and you need the art to be embedded in the tag as is the modern convention, not just thrown in the folder as is the old convention.

Hmm. Now getting into an area I'm not too familiar with. I have a lot of album art because I use iTunes, so I'll have to experiment a bit to see if I can figure out what's really going on. Thanks for the input!!

[hybrid90]

OK. I'm trying to get this to work and I'm really wondering if this is even possible now. I use iTunes (I have a Mac, not a Windows computer) and part of the info tab for the tracks will show me what ID Tag version it is. So I put a few tracks on a flash drive that I knew were v2.3 and knew that they had album art. A few of them had art provided by iTunes and a few had album art already embedded when I got the track. Unfortunately, I have no idea how to see the info for the album art (I'm assuming it's in the metadata which again, I have no idea how to see) and the MP3 Tag program that you guys were referring to isn't for Mac.

A few details:
1. The flash drive I'm using is the same flash drive that BMW sent their Navigation Maps on, just wiped clean.
2. My car is a 4/10 build, so while I have Bluetooth calling and iPod connectivity/control, I don't have a Combox.
3. When I had a loaner X1, I connected my phone with the lightning cable and it displayed most of the album art that I had. I know that it's the newer version of the entertainment system and I don't know if it has any bearing here, but I thought I'd mention it for full disclosure.

Any help or ideas on this would be greatly appreciated, or just a "it's not possible with your system" is fine too.

[ice_nyne]

Originally Posted by hybrid90

I'm not meaning to hijack this thread, but I have a couple of question. First, what CiC are you running? I also have a 2011, but a 04/10 build date so I have all iPod functionality and Bluetooth

According to RealOEM.com, the build date for my e90 is 05/11. I can't speak to any of the technology improvements BMW may have made to the CIC between your build date and mine. My car does have a USB in and does display/play back music from my iPod directly. It displays the artwork from the iPod too, though the resolution is not nearly as crisp as what resides on my usb thumb drive.

Originally Posted by hybrid90

Second, how are you putting the files on the Flash Drive? What I mean is, are you putting just the .MP3 file on there or the entire folder (Artist>Album>Song.MP3)? I tried putting just the .MP3 files on and it played fine, but the organization and order were all over the place.

My approach involved a lot of curation. I'm not going to misrepresent the amount of time invested in getting everything how I wanted it, but I am a neat freak like that. What I did was create a new iTunes library and point it directly at the usb stick. Then I moved albums over from my home iTunes folder to the usb stick using finder (windows explorer for you Windows types), and then added new music in iTunes using the menu. I primarily did this so I could use 2 iTunes plugins to further refine the metadata:

- Increment Number Tags: Renumbers multi-disc albums in sequential order so that they appear in the correct numeric order in the USB file system, as well as visually on-screen.

- Batch Export Playlists: Exports one (or many) playlists from iTunes to the USB stick in a way it can be picked up by the CIC and navigated. I have a lot of playlists I like to listen to and it's been a great experience. Behaves exactly like a playlist on the iPod would. Be advised you are limited to 255 tracks - this is a windows structure after all, and 255 files hits the limit for folder or an XML.

I use MP3 tag to remove tags that iTunes does not surface (for ex., copyright, ripping software, author), and to manage the artwork piece.

Hope that helps.

[hybrid90]

Originally Posted by ice_nyne

According to RealOEM.com, the build date for my e90 is 05/11. I can't speak to any of the technology improvements BMW may have made to the CIC between your build date and mine. My car does have a USB in and does display/play back music from my iPod directly. It displays the artwork from the iPod too, though the resolution is not nearly as crisp as what resides on my usb thumb drive.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure that something was changed in that last year of the E90. I have full iPod functionality, but it has NEVER shown any artwork. I don't even see a place for it to be.

Thanks so much for taking the time to respond to my questions. I really appreciate it.