rcurley55

Hi Everyone,

I feel like I've been to hell and back trying to get my iTunes library ready for use in my 2010 535i (iDrive, CIC, and 6FL installed - no combox upgrade). Let me apologize in advance, because this will be long and read more like a troubleshooting thread than anything else. If you want to cut to the chase, read the Cliff Notes at the bottom.

THE SETUP
Because I like to stream music/podcasts from my iPhone and I wanted to have my entire library on hand without switching wires, I came up with the following:

1. Use a BlackBerry Stereo Gateway for A2DP into the Aux In jack in the center console
2. Hook up some kind of USB device to the USB port in the center console

HARDWARE ISSUES
I expect Item 1 to be easy, that's fairly straight forward. It was Item 2 that was the issue. First I had to figure out the hardware. I have used USB sticks successfully but they were all too small to hold my library (I have over 60gb of music - approximately 6,000 tracks spread across 300+ albums and 150+ artists). By no means do I have the largest library out there, but its significant enough that you have to be able to batch process this stuff.

I also tried an old iPod Video in USB mode. I had mixed results with it and decided to skip using it. I also had a portable Western Digital 120 GB 2.5" external HDD sitting around. As it turns out this drive works perfectly. If you want more on drives that work, go here:

http://www.e90post.com/forums/showthread.php?t=96309

FILE STRUCTURE
With the hardware worked out, it was onto the file structure. My iTunes library is fairly meticulously maintained. All songs have appropriate tags for artist, album, track, title, art, etc. The source of these tags have been multiple mp3 editors over the years, including iTunes. My files are organized as follows:

Artist
-->Album
---->Track

The tracks use the following naming convention XX Title where XX is the track number in a two digit format. Where I had multiple disc albums, it was Y-XX Title, where Y is the disc number. From what I gather, iDrive will index properly tagged files no matter their location, so you can use a different setup than this. Because the character length is limited in the browse directory portion, I didn't want to add any more length to my file names than necessary.

I simply dragged and dropped my iTunes folder onto the drive, plugged it in, and the drive appeared correctly. It would never index the drive. So I started browsing the directories and everything seemed fine. Without the index, it was a little cumbersome to navigate.

So I shrunk the size of the library that I was trying to work with to see if I could get it to index - it worked. I could find files (although the location of some of the files seemed very "off") and would navigate to a particular album or song by the index and hit "Start Play." This would give me an "unable to play file" error and nothing would happen.

I started to fix this by looking at all of the hidden files on the drive or non-MP3 files. There were a ton of files mirroring my mp3 files but with a prefix of "._" and there were a lot of .jpg files.

For more on the "._" files, go here:

http://support.apple.com/kb/TA20578

Essentially, they had to be deleted as the car was attempting to play these instead of the real mp3 file. I also hunted for anything that was .jpg to remove the album art that was not embedded in the mp3s. I also did a search for any files that were very small in size (less than 1 mb) and removed them. I also pulled any movies, tv shows, books, or other data off of the drive and out of the old iTunes library on the portable drive.

MP3 TAGS
I went back to the car, put the entire library back on, and in a few minutes, the drive was indexed and songs/albums would all play correctly. The problem was that some albums were thrown into the category of "Various Artists." Now, I know they are tagged in iTunes; however, the car was not reading the tags correctly. I plugged the drive back into my Windows 7 machine at the office and I noticed that tags would not show up for the files that I was having problems with, but would show up on the other files.

To go a step further, I installed mp3tag and noticed that all of the files that were causing problems were indeed tagged, but in ID3 tag v2.4. The files that worked correctly were in v2.3.

So I batch converted them all to v2.3, put the drive back into the car and all of the files showed up and were indexed properly. The only remaining issue was with albums with multiple discs. The iDrive system sorts songs by track number. If multiple tracks with the same number are found, it then sorts alphabetically by track title. I went back to mp3tag and batch converted my track numbering so that all multi-disc albums used a cumulative numbering scheme. I could then batch out the track names to match the rest of the scheme.

Plopped the drive back in, it indexed in a few minutes and SUCCESS!!

CLIFF'S NOTES
1. Delete any files you don't need, specifically, .jpg and ._ files
2. Convert all of your tags to v2.3
3. Use a good tag editor (I like mp3tag) to automate the process
4. Pick a USB stick/drive that others have had success with (see link above)
5. Don't trust that just because it will work in iTunes, it will work with iDrive. My iDrive saw my iPod/iPhone libraries perfectly, but when that exact library was copied onto a HDD, it fell apart

I hope that helps people who are having trouble with this. I searched around and didn't find solutions to these issues. By no means is this comprehensive and PLEASE backup your library before performing any operations across large numbers of files.