Muchisgiven

I would really like to do this...I have an 08 550i with a USB port and a headphone jack....I want to know if this option would work for me, because I'm tired of unplugging, and plugging my iPhone in. So any recommendations would be great

Rudy

Unless I'm missing something, I'm pretty sure that everything I've mentioned in this thread will apply to you and your car...

The only real downside to this setup is that the more music you have on the drive, the longer it takes to index the metadata of the files when you first plug it in or start the car. On my drive, I have the songs all saved in a directory structure that allows me to quickly access what I want by using the straight "directory" method. Once the drive is played for a while, the "playlists", "genre", "artist", etc. selections become available and you can utilize things more simply.

What's strange (but also nice) is that if you're listening to songs from a playlist and you turn the car off, when you return, the car will continue to play the songs in the playlist even though the actual playlist isn't available yet due to the re-indexing process still taking place.

Overall, I find this solution to be a great one since I don't have to have a monster iPod sitting in the car all the time. It's just easier for me to have a copy of all my music in the car at all times.

nbotlaguduru

I like this option but couldn't figure out a way to create playlists (Step by Step instructions will be helpful if any one know how to do this) and playing Random Albums or Songs.

I have 08 535i with iphone Adapter and really didn't like the way i had to do with my iphone, plugging and unplugging.

If I can figure out how to do Playlists and Randam Play using my USB Drive I don't need to spend my money on buying a 20gB iPod and keep it there for ever in the car.

Please help.

Rudy

The car will work with playlists in .M3U format but depending on how you initially create the playlist file, you may have to tweak things a bit for it to work in the car.

What I did was create the .M3U file in Windows Media Player (but you can use whatever you want, I imagine) and once I saved it, I used a text editor (like Notepad) to do a find & replace to remove any hard coded drive mapping or UNC path that may be present in the music file's path.

The car will read a relative path (from the root of the drive) by just using a '\' at the first character in the path.

In other words, say you have three songs on your drive you want to use in a playlist.

The songs files are located in the following paths on the USB drive:
\Music\Artist1\Album1\Song1.mp3
\Music\Artist2\Album3\Song2.mp3
\Music\Artist3\Album3\Song3.mp3
(obviously, you can use any path to any song...)

The M3U file, where it lists the path to the song file (just after each #EXTINF: line) needs to look just like the lines above.

Again, the simplest way to do this is to create the playlist in something like Windows Media Player. Once it's created, open it in Notepad or Wordpad and use Find/Replace to modify the path (i.e. C:\Music\Artist1\Album1\Song1.mp3) so it does not contain the C: and/or anything else that isn't correct for the USB drive.

Got it?