Just got my new '05 545 with Sport, Nav, HUD, CWP. Needless to say, the car is just fantastic.

Was playing around with the menus in IDrive, and had a question about the CD player (I don't have the premium sound package):

1. How the heck do you pause a CD? I was driving around yesterday listening to my CD and had to make a few phone calls (via BT and my V600, btw). For the life of my, I couldn't find how to pause the CD. What I am missing??

 

Welcome JStraw! Don't recall the exact steps, but in the iDrive, you can program the steering wheel buttons, and one of those options is to have one button "Mute" the CD/Radio. When muting the CD, it actually pauses the CD as well so that when you unmute, the CD picks up right where you muted it.

 

push the volume turn knob ... its the ON | OFF for the radio/cd/etc.

 

Mine pauses automatically when making or receiving phone calls, but as kscarrol pointed out you can assign one of the progammable buttons using the i menu, Vehicle Settings, Steering Wheel buttons and selecting your choice to mute, which on a CD will pause it as well.

 

My brother pointed that out to me the other day, it actually is an Off/On button that also works as a mute button. He asked me: are you mutting or turning the CD off... same thing I guess.

 

In my mind, just muting stops the sound but the CD would continue to "play" so that if you unmuted it after a 10 phone call, you could 2 or 3 songs deeper into your CD. That makes it more than just a mute function for the CD player. As for whether it truly turns off the CD player, I don't know that. It definitely pauses so that you restart in the same spot.

 

Exactly. That's probably why I didn't even think that the mute button would pause the CD. Something I will try this evening.

There is always the On/Off switch, I guess.

 

I think the engineers idea was that the switch acts as both a mute and an on/off switch. If you stop the music for a short period of time, I believe the disk is still spinning and therefore can be somewhat instantly revived (like a mute or pause function). If you stop the music for a long period of time (or switch to another audio source like radio) the disk will stop spinning but your last location will be in memory. You can still start from your last spot but it will take an extra second or two to get the rpms back up on the disc.

This is particularly notable to me when I am listening to a CD in the single slot but want to change over to the 6 disc changer in the glove box and return where I left off among the 6 discs. I hit eject on the in-dash CD (which dumps to radio) and then pull up CD again in iDrive (which dumps to where I left off in the changer).

 

Welcome aboard, JStraw !

 

welcome aboard, jstraw !