Unpowered USB Hub
Hub lights up.
iPod does not work when plugged in.

Powered USB Hub
iPod works when plugged in.
When a second device is plugged in, the first device stops and is removed from the list. Neither device works.

 

Profiles

My car doesn't have Settings->Profiles.

With which option do you get that?

USB KEY Apple Lossless
"Cannot play audio file"

NTFS
not supported

M4P files
ignored

 

I wondered about that. Shame because there's really no reason why the software couldn't accept more than one usb device.

 

Are there any other cars on the market (or aftermarket head units) that support the features being discussed here (USB hub with more than one device at a time, NTFS, M4P, etc)?

 

Why do you ask?

 

I ask because USB ports likely have similar capabilities across the auto industry. If other car makers don't support NTFS, it's doubtful that MINI would add their own support for it. I would not have expected USB hubs to be supported. An auto maker would provide their own multiple USB ports. They don't want a customer to plug in some generic USB hub and expect it to work.

 

120gb USB drive formatted with exFat
Success! And it is a power hungry drive.

WMA lossless on this drive
"Cannot play audio file"

 

I suspect what file systems are supported has to do with the system architecture.

The same would be true of USB hubs. It would be difficult to reduce the capabilities of the operating system.

In this case it allowed the powered USB hub, which is great, it is one way to power devices that exceed the capacity of the USB port, it recognized that another device was plugged in, which suggests the operating system is capable of handling multiple devices, then removed the first device from the list, which seems like programming. My guess is that limiting the number of devices to one greatly simplifies the UI.

 

NTFS is 100% proprietary to Microsoft. They have not released the specification. NTFS embeds security features Microsoft treats as a trade secret.

What non-Windows support you see out there has been reversed engineered and is generally read only.

Fat32 supports drives up to 2tb, is a published standard, and is the #1 formatting system in the world. This is why all commercially available USB drives come pre-formatted in Fat32.

You had to use your Windows PC to reformat that drive in NTFS.

BTW, I would not recommend doing that. NTFS was not designed for portable drives and you will have security related file access issues on other PCs if you are not careful.

 

Too cool NoMeansNo wristband USB drive
Works!

Flac files
ignored :(

 

You have a logic error there.

I had to reformat that drive to get it to work with the MINI.

 

When I discovered that it could not do FLAC, I was pretty disappointed. I was hoping to not have to transcode everything that I wanted to play in the MINI. Would have been so nice to not have to keep up with multiple formats based on where I need to play it.


One thing I've noticed is that it doesn't seem to like encoding over 192 Kbs. The files will show in the menu with song title, but just not play when selected. No message displayed, just silence.


Anyone else encounter that or is it maybe a combination of multiple factors?

 

You had a USB drive that came pre-formatted in NTFS?

That would be unusual.

Check out
http://www.howtogeek.com/177529/htg-explains-why-are-removable-drives-still-using-fat32-instead-of-ntfs/

Except for the need to support files larger than 4gb, it just makes no sense to format portable drives in anything other than Fat32.

 

No, it's not my USB drive and it had previously been formatted in NTFS.

 

120gb USB drive formatted with Fat32
It works.

WAV (pcm)
They work.

 

Not that I know of.

 

What features are supported are largely determined by which chipsets they are using. For this type of consumer product, the audio formats, USB control, and file access are functions embedded in interface chips.

 

USB DVD-Writer
No.

What else can I try?

 

What audio system do you have? My HK plays FLAC

 

HK. No Navigation or anything, just the basic display. How are you doing it?

 

I have HK and Nav XL maybe that's the difference. But I played a FLAC file direct from a usb drive no problems. I tried a .m4a file (apple lossless) and that was a no go.

 

I would be interested to know who can play FLAC files! If we can pinpoint the requirements.
I will have to see if I can post my software versions.

I tried again and it does not consider them to be music files. I wonder if I can put them in a wav container.

120 GB USB drive formatted with EXT3
not supported

 

Highly doubt you'll get FLAC support on many cars. I have about 20-30 albums recorded in flac. I ended up converting to Apple Lossless and throwing them on a 120GB iPod with the rest oft library

 

So the Linux world is out of luck. So what file systems are supported? Have you done a list?

 

Fat32
exFat

I will keep experimenting.