This is for those interested in having a large music collection permanently in-car, but without the need for a cable running to your phone or external device.

Get a USB drive of the size you need. I grabbed a 128GB model from PNY at Best Buy for $80. You may need more. You may need less.

Load your music on the drive, and don't worry too much about format. The in-car system seems to read a variety of formats. Didn't test it with FLAC or Ogg Vorbis, though...

Now, for the real work, of altering your metadata so that the car can handle it better:

1) First, make sure you're ONLY changing the metadata on the copy of your music that you'll be using in your car. A lot of these changes are not things you'd want to do to your "real" collection, as desktop media clients are much smarter.

2) The in-car system will not sort by "Album Artist" so compilation albums will make your Artist list WAYYY longer than it should be. Unless you want to scroll past hundreds of Artists with a single song each, you've got to do something. I sacrificed the individual track Artist information, changing all of them to just "Compilations." That means that I have one "Artist" entry, in which is contained a list of comp albums. That's nice. What's not nice is that, if I don't already know who sings a particular track on a particular album, my car isn't going to tell me. But it's a reasonable trade-off, imo. And my home collection still has the correct metadata.

You could certainly call your Compilations something else, like "Various Artists," but "Various Artists" is what the car calls things when it get confused reading your flash drive. I chose not to use it, so that when I see "Various Artists" I know I need to back up and make the car take another stab at reading the drive. Not sure what causes it, but I've seen it happen a couple of times.

The only exception I made was to change the artist listing of Tribute albums to the artist being tributed.


3) Fix variations in artists naming. Do you have entries for both "Frank Black and The Catholics" and "Frank Black & The Catholics?" Your desktop media software probably isn't confused by this, but your MINI will be and will consider them two different artists. And guessing at which of them is likely to contain your copy of "Pistelero" while you cruise down the highway is a pain in the ***. Pick one spelling and change all entries to that.

4) Oh, but maybe even go a step further and just change them to "Frank Black" so that the Catholics and non-Catholics albums are listed together. Again, make sure you're ONLY changing the copies you use in your car.

There will likely be some weird judgement calls needed (If you've got both Elvis Costello and Bill Frissell in your collection, where do you file the EP they did together?). Just make them and move on. The goal here is less about absolute accuracy and more about making your Artist list more navigable.

5) You know how some songs will be listed as "MAIN ARTIST, ft. Other Guy?" Yeah, your car doesn't think those songs are part of the same album as the ones before and after it which are just credited to "MAIN ARTIST." Sorry, featured guy, you've got to go.

6) Ever stop to think how many bands are called The Somethingorothers? Yeah, in your MINI, all of those bands will be filed under T. Looking for The Apples In Stereo? They're not in the As. So scroll ALL THE WAY DOWN...or, go through and remove "THE" from the artist field of all those bands. No, it's not correct (except for Talking Heads, which shouldn't have had THE in front to begin with), but it makes finding what you're looking for easier.

I think that's it. In short, the MINI Connected music navigation is similar in its limitations to what iTunes and similar software was like ten or so years ago. Far from perfect, but with some creative inaccuracy, you can bend it into a usable system. And not having to plug/unplug your phone, or have a cable permanently stretched across your car is nice.

 

Good stuff - must admit I'm disappointed the latest in car software seems a real step backwards from my 09 Cooper - needs an inordinate amount of faffing about to select an artist. Tried the so called 'Plug-in' recently and couldn't find any way of going back to the list of artists or even the same artists album list. Even my old 09 was much easier in this respect. I may well try the advice given and see if it helps. Thinking about it, my old 09 let me use DVDs full of .mp3s (in the dash Nav disk slot) - pretty sure my 13 SD won't do that - see, another backwards step from BMW.

 

I don't know how the 09 worked, but here it's just. SEARCH, then ARTIST. That brings up the matter list of artists. After you select one, scroll down to ALBUMS to select an album.

Once it's playing, returning to the search screen, your previous entries are still selected. If you want a new album by the same artist, just go directly to the ALBUM field to select a new one. If you choose the ARTIST field, it will automatically clear the album field.


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