Hello E60 Members,

I am picking up my 550 6MT soon at the Welt and I just purchased a 8 GB USB drive, Lexar Media, $173.00 US. Does anyone have any suggestions on which is the best software to store songs from CDs on this device. I have the usual Microsoft Player and Real Player on my computer, do I need additional software to burn these ? Any recommendations ?


Thanks for any advice,

Cheers,
Roland

Menlo Park, CA USA

PS. Does any know if the Manual Transmission Gear Shift indicator in the dashboard area can be turned on for US manual trans cars ? (Just curious to see it working..)

 

Just use Windows Media Player to "RIP" songs off of the CD. You'll need to choose a format and bitrate. I'd recommend using .WMA format with at least a 192kbps bit rate. The higher the bitrate, the better the songs will sound (but most people can't tell much difference once you start to get up into the 192kbps and higher range.)

Windows Media Player will save all the newly ripped songs into directories based on artist name then album name. After that, just copy the entire artist folder to the USB media and you're done. If you have a lot of artists, I recommend making alphabetical folders based on two letters. For example, make folders named "A-B", "C-D", "E-F", "G-H", etc. That way, you can put each artist in the appropriate alphabetical folder to reduce the amount of scrolling you have to do if you're looking up music based on the drives directory structure. The car will index all the music (eventually) and provide you with lists based on album, artist, genre, and song so this directory structure is really only needed once in a while.

Good luck and enjoy your new car!

 

Thanks Rudy

 

Good to see you back Roland! Last time I saw you at the Bay Area meet & greet you had your previous 550! Enjoy the new one and best of luck.