I have a 2006 550i and recently had the dealer install the iPod connection in my glovebox. My iPod works wonderfully (I can see and play all of my songs and playlists) and I use it every day. The problem is I have over 10,000 songs on my iPod (and hundreds of different artists). If I were to play a song by a particular artists (as opposed to a playlist), I would use my iDrive to scroll down to that artist's name and begin playing their music. This is fine except if I want to play an artist near the end of the alphabet (e.g., U2). To scroll down to U2 literally take minutes (meanwhile I have a 6-speed manual transmission and usually need my non-steering wheel hand to shift gears) and is so unwieldy and impractical that I never listen to artists after the letter C (I probably have over a hundred artists just in A-C). I have a couple of questions:

1. can BMW's voice command function recognize artist names? If yes, this solves my problems.
2. is there a faster way to scroll down the various iPod lists using iDrive? One option would be to create 26 separate playlists in iTunes for each letter of the alphabet, but 26 new playlists combined w/ my other 15 or so playlists makes that function very unwieldy (although this is better than my current situation).
3. is there a way to manually punch in the artist name or the letter in which the artist's name starts with?

 

On your car (one that doesn't have the newer USB/iPod interface) I don't think there's an easy fix. I've never used the interface you have with an iPod so I could be mistaken but doing the playlist workaround might be something to try. Keep in mind that you don't have to do 26 playlists, you could combine some letters of the alphabet (like a-b, c-d, etc.) so that there are less playlists to scroll through.

On the newer USB/iPod interface (available on LCI cars), there was similar scrolling issue when using USB drives (might have also existed with iPods) but a recent software version attempted to fix this by allowing a faster scroll without displaying the actual names on the list. Instead, it just shows a numeric 'placeholder' that allows for much faster scrolling. I have no idea if this software update would fix your problem with the older interface.

As far as voice commands, as of now you can't do it and, although I wouldn't hold my breath, it's possible that they could add this functionality in a future software release like they did with the voice dialing of phonebook entries and navigation destinations...