I've found this issue with both my old iPhone (4, hopefully MINI will offer an upgraded cable w/ Lightning connector, but BMW will probably charge double the Apple gouge) and my iPod Nano.

I'm listening to a playlist. I have it set to shuffle songs. At random times one of the following two events occur:

• After a song ends, a brief fraction of a second of a new song starts, then a a completely different song begins to play normally.
• Somewhere in the middle of a song, it just ends and a new song starts playing from the beginning.

This appears to be a completely random occurrence. While in never has happened with two songs in a row, it can happen with most any track and seems to be completely random. I'd say that at least 80% of the tracks play without this happening.

As I've seen this behavior with two different devices--and not at all with these devices when they are not connected to my MINI and playing through the head unit, it seems reasonable to conclude that there is a bug in the head unit, likely in the software. Has anyone else encountered this behavior, and is it likely that it's something that MINI would ever fix?

 

Sounds like your Ipod DB file is getting corrupt between the headunit and ipod ... my alpine does the stutter thing every once in a while but my issue is attibuted to the spin up of the HDD (5.5gen 30gb) and caching the 32+ MB ALAC files into ramspace... i wouldnt know about the fix as i dont own a mini yet but clear the NANO of all music then format/restore and then load it as it is now and see if the issue still persists.

 

If it were a device problem, it wouldn't happen on two different devices, but it would happen when not connected. And as both devices use solid-state storage, there's no spin up necessary.

There should be no need to cache a doggone thing. Picking a random item from a fixed-list list takes some tiny fraction of a second in code, measured in instants, and queuing up the track associated with that random number should also be virtually instantaneous. With well-written code, that is.

 

If you read what I said you would understand that my issue that is similar to yours comes from my ipod spinning its hdd up and caching it to ram... I know that the nano is solid state but as I said it could be an issue with the head unit not reading the DB file correctly hence giving the issues you have with 2 devices clear whichever is easiest and then report your findings. If the issue still persists with the nano then ask the dealer to update tbe head units software if this is an option.