I'm thinking of pulling a trigger on a 2010 Mini that was built in late 09. I'd like to use my 60GB USB flash drive but reading-up on limitations of the factory stereo - it makes me a little apprehensive.

Does anyone know if Mini/BMW released any SW/FW patches to address 20k item limitation or slowness of the "Random" function?

Also, does it really rescan the drive every time you power up the car (and thus no music for the first 30+ secs) even though the drive is not being removed?

 

If you've got a 60GB drive then you'll almost certainly be looking at a lot longer than 30 seconds for it to scan.

 

Perfect... Ugh.

 

It does appear to reread the drive every time, because it picks up changes. However, if it already "knows" that particular drive and you were already playing a song from it, the song starts almost right away.

I just got a couple of 4gb usb micro-drives and loaded each with about 3gb of music. When I plugged them in for the first time music started almost right away (don't know how it picked the song) and it took about a minute for the Artist/Album/Genre options to appear. I took their appearance to mean it was done reading the drive.

 

Sounds like no firmware updates... That stinks, you'd think they would have addressed issues like that.

 

Funny, I don't have this issue with my 60Gb Ipod, which has about 33Gb on it. Music starts up instantly once I start the car. Only time I get a significant delay is after re-syncing my Ipod.

 

The USB option was realy designed for the iPod integration and was an after thought to make it read USB Thumb drives.

It is not a Limitation of the Software but a Limitation of the Hardware that drives the USB. It is part of the Bluetooth ULF module and as such has other hardware limitations as well. I.E very little RAM so have the information in so it scans the drive every time it starts up. On small fast USB drives it only takes a few seconds to reread but on slow USB thumb drives it can take a few minutes even for a 2gig.

 

OK, this is slick! I have two 4gb flash drives, one with music my wife and I both enjoy and one with music that only I enjoy.

When I switch between them, it remembers what song it was on and what the settings were, as far as artist/random, etc.

That is very nice!

 

You obviously do not get near the 20k data points then because if you did it would not remember that info.

 

Yes, that's correct, I have about 1,500 songs on each drive right now.

 

Where is the USB port?
Haven't read the manual :-)