[doughboy]

Originally Posted by Ant Man

I am a convert and have removed my 7 CDs from the car.

Cheers Mike.

No probs

Originally Posted by Rochdale Pioneers

I ditched my CDs (and MiniDiscs) years ago to go fully electronic. I never got aurally the difference between 128 or even 96 CBR wma and lossless (even on decent speakers/ear buds) so all my files are compressed.

I only use lossless (FLAC) for master storage, as its free, future proof (not proprietory either like WML etc) and can be converted again and again over time to whatever format is the fashion of the time, without ever having to re-scan your CDs. You think MP3 will be any good in 5/10 years time??

If you compress (i.e. remove date from) your masters, then you are already on a slippery slope as you will be compressing compressed files in future and they will get worse and worse each time.

I'm no audiophile, but I found, even in the car, the difference between say 250VBR and 320CBR was very noticeable.

196 or less is dire.

So 320CBR being the 'best' MP3 format and still 30% of original size is great. Storage is cheap now of course!

[m@rk]

OK heres the way I have been doing this for a few years now.

At home I have a sizeable music collection which I have totally digitized.

After a lot of trial and error around sound quality vs the ability to play on various devices etc I settled on Windows Media as my main format. It means I can rip CDs to a lossless format that plays on many devices (including in my car). But I also have music in MP3 format (for when audio quality is not paramount or for stuff bought online that is only available in that format).

Ultimately though it doesn't really matter. Choose the format that works for you.

But I do use Windows Media Player to manage all of this.

For my car the process is 2 fold.

WMP allows you to create playlists. I have a playlist for the car and it is dead easy to manage this in WMP

You then set up a sync relationship with your USB stick (just follow the prompts).

When I plug my USB stick into the computer a WMP automatically syncs the playlist for my car with it. I can sync multiple playlists if I want to.

More importantly though it also encodes the files to 192kbps Windows Media before it transfers it to the stick (and leaves the original file intact). So regardless of the file being lossless or MP3 or something else, WMP deals with it. You can tell WMP not to do this conversion but to be honest, you will struggle to hear the difference between 192kbps WMA and Lossless in the car (at home yes but not in the car).

That's it.

Windows Media Player is the key here and maybe surprisingly it will deal with all the different formats for you so simply you end up with a USB stick that just plays the music you want in the car.

Simples

[orbist]

Hi all, newby, but one thing thats been bugging me is why the system ignores the mp3 tag "track number" - i see above comments about "playing in alphabetical order" and having to add 01 etc to the name of the track. I have a huge mp3 collection that I spent a weekend "tagging" and setting the track order etc, but its a pain the car system seems to ignore this and set via track name instead. I guess i need to go back through and rename everything with 01 02 etc in the names, but wondered if anyone had found an option for the system to pick up on the track order already set in the mp3 tags. cheers

PS. For those of you with Linux machines,etc, lame is one of the best encoders. You can select to keep CD quality, but use variable bit rate encoding. So when it can it reduces the bit-rate down and up etc. I find this saves about 30% capacity for mp3s but keeps the quality. If you get hold of a Creative soundcard for your PC, they contain an amazing chip called a "crystaliser" which puts back what the lossy mp3 encoding loses, and it really does work. So you can save mp3s for both the car and your home media collection as mp3 - I come from having over 3000+ vinyl, so have been sampling as wav files, encoding to mp3 and tagging manually for a long time!

[kmcgoneg]

so i've formatted a 32gb usb flash drive DOS/FAT, and loaded about 29 gb of music on it. so far (after about 2 weeks), there's still about 5 minutes of silence before the music kicks in. hoping this gets better! (this is on a non-idrive 2009) 335i.

is there any software update available that might make the USB port more responsive?

#newbie

[BanziBarn]

Originally Posted by kmcgoneg

so i've formatted a 32gb usb flash drive DOS/FAT, and loaded about 29 gb of music on it. so far (after about 2 weeks), there's still about 5 minutes of silence before the music kicks in. hoping this gets better! (this is on a non-idrive 2009) 335i.

is there any software update available that might make the USB port more responsive?

#newbie

I think this may be related to the speed of the stick. Mine takes about 30 seconds to start playing (32gb stick) but about 5 minutes to index the files if I want to search by album etc.

Maybe try a different stick?