I have an 02 and the stock head unit skips when I hit small bumps when playing a cd. Some are burned on home pc but when I play them in other car it soes not skip. It is very irritating and I should have told the dealer but I wonder if that is common or if it may be warranty thing

 

I have an early 04 and the radio skips much less than I thought it would given the stiff suspension. I've hit potholes that I thought would have busted a rim from the feel and the CD player played fine.

 

Are you burning them through iTunes?

 

I have had CDs skip in both my 325 and mini, but it is not very frequent. The stiffness of the 02 suspension, esp. early builds, can easily induce CD skipping.

If it is out of control though, bring it into the shop, you could have bad suspension within the HU which is inducing skipping more often.

 

Thanks for the tips. It is not I tunes but just Kazaa or bearshare music burned on home PC

 

Don't know if the head unit has changed significantly over the years....
but my stock unit has never - but never - skipped....but I only play "store bought" CD's.

Some of them are pretty old and have skipped in other units (I have a Dave Brubeck Take Five from mid 80's that is particularly problematic)....I have one of the very very very early CD home decks. Circa 1984....and CD's from that era....

When I was carrying the special order CD player out of a nice stereo store in Miami - four folks offered to buy it from me before I got to the door.....in Miami in those days, that no one mugged me is significant....

If you skip a lot on store bought CD's I'd complain to MINI. If you only have a problem on home-burns I suspect they will tell you to pound sand....

 

CDs skip like crazy, no matter what kind in my 04 MCS. store bought ones, burned ones, it doesn't matter.

I only use my iPod in there now.

 

I've found that as CD players get dirtier, they tend to skip more. But some players are more prone to skip on some discs than others. For example, I used to have Blaupunkt in my previous car. It never skipped on commercially pressed CDs, but it would with some burned CDs. I found through experimentation that some brands (different dyes) would be better than others. Verbatim's Azo (dark blue) would work well with the Blaupunkt. But not so well with the Pioneer in my parents car. Whatever manufacturer TDK was using at the time (light green underside) was better.

Also, I found one way to improve tracking was to burn using a CD burner that had a slower write speed (I usually burn at 4X or slower) and use one that has the ability to spread the data out. On Yamaha's, this was called Audio Quality Mastering. Despite what it sounds like, the data that gets written is not better sounding. It just more space to write the same data. So an 80 min cd can only hold 68 minutes. But it does improve the ability of more CD players to read the data reliably, and skip less.

If you're having trouble with burned CDs only, I'd suggest re-writing using your existing media to as slow a speed as possible, and if that doesn't improve things, try using different colored media. Also, some burners just aren't as physically stable as others; I've found that most of the laptops that come with cd-burners (the super thin-profile ones) really can't reliably burn audio cds accurately. With data cd's it's okay, since the computer can use error correction to recover most of the smaller glitches. In that case it's probably best to spend $40 on an external enclosure and then another $40 on an external CD or DVD burner.

 

I had to upgrade the quality of my cds. MINI cd player seems to be somewhat picky Haven't had ANY issues since upgrading.