If you have the Mini supplied cable then i should work as any ohter iPod should work.

Your limitations will be the same as with USB Stick. Read this thread and the others about all the limitations There are to many to list here here again.

You can leave it plugged in with no problem, and you can remove it with no problem. The iPod is seeing the USB voltage and thinks that it can not be unplugged until it see a drop command by iTunes or loss of USB voltage.

Again read this thread and others on this subject and you will find the limitations of the USB system. Using the iPod as an iPod and not an external drive is the only way to go if you have that much music. Again that is because of the limits on the USB in the Mini, which are to many to list here again.


best regards and thankyou for your answers.[/quote]

TUDOR II,

You may have answered this question before but exactly what version of Nano do you have? Is there a serial number on the back?

I ask again because my gf has a Nano that i gave her just after they came out and a friend has one that is about 1 year old and they both work perfectly. But i do have to use the MINI supplied cable. That is a must.

 

I'm not the most gadget savy person but i do have a MCCS on order, should take delivery in about a month and i do have the usb/ipod option. My question is will a Microsoft Zune work in place of an Ipod or even hook up throgh the USB port and act as a hard drive to play music. Thanks for any help. And sorry if I'm posting a duplicate question but I haven't any questions regarding a Zune yet.

 

Tudor II, I have one of the first (quite easy to scratch
) , 2005 it says the box, I just cleaned the Ipod (no songs) then activate as external disc, but nothing about give it format. And in the screen i can see the "Connected" Icon, apparently because the battery was full charged at that time.

schatzy62, Thankyou very much for your answers, the worrying part was about that screen, but its ok now, and in this part of the continent (Mexico actually) its hard to get that Mini Ipod cable, dealer only had the audio one and quite expensive... I'll keep looking for other options.


Regards

 

There have been reports of a Zune working as an external drive and no more control over it in that state than a USB Stick. Also the same limitations apply to the Zune as an Exteranl Drive as to a USB Stick.

The Zune will work as a Zune is intended thru the use of the controls on screen on it and having a audio cable from the ear phone jack to teh audio in on in the console.

 

You do not actually state what type of computer you are conncting you iPod to to transfer audio to it. Is it a Windows machine or a Mac machine.
Unfortunately the Mini supplied cable has electronics in it and is the only cable on the market that will work with the MINI for full iPod control from the dash and MFSW. Others have tried other USB type cables and they have not worked as they do not have the electronics.

If you need a cable the cabel in the US is $105.00 and i could get you one and send it to you if that is a better price for you.

 

Thanks schatzy62 for the info... u seem to be full of good info in here... I'll give you an update in about a month hopefully.

 

The first USB drive I tried was a Samsung 12Gb mini-hard drive. It worked flawlessly, but unfortunately it was a tad delicate as I dropped it and that's all she wrote.

However, I've since acquired a 160Gb Iomega eGo (with drop guard). The USB port doesn't provide enough current to power it, so it needs external power. I happened to have a 12v-4.5v cigarette lighter adapter, and it provided all the power necessary. I found an adapter to hardwire the drive, which will make things a lot neater as I will store the drive in the "secret compartment". Also, I'll tap into the USB port and run a line up to the drive. With 80Gb of files on it, the load time is ~30 seconds - very acceptable. The best part is, the drives are selling for under $100!

Next thing I need to do is reverse front/rear channels on the radio so I can hear all the bass I should be hearing (vs. that nasty popping from the door speakers).

 

Be sure to check out this post before doing to much there are limitations on the amount of data that the MINI can use to access and sort the the drive. It is all explained in this thread.

https://www.northamericanmotoring.co...3&postcount=67

 

Understand, and have read all that before... I have 80gb of music on the drive, and don't really intend to put much more on it. Besides, that's a lot of music! The most important things to do are be smart in how you organize the drive, and make sure to limit the data fields/song (keep title and artist, ditch the rest) as the radio head unit can only handle 20k worth of data fields. That being said, for under $100 it is way more cost effective than an ipod.

 

Not really. I have over 400GB yes that is giga bytes.

7984 albums
6057 artists
60000 + songs

in my current collection and growing daily.

BTW it is not 20kb of data it is 20,000 Read again

"i believe that the track information allotment of 20,000 items is a combination of title, artist, track #, genre etc. so that would mean that if each track had 5 peices of information attached to it then there would only be information stored on 4000 songs. I.E. 4000 times the 5 pieces of track information = 20,000 pieces of track information. The reason i say this is that i have had only about 500 songs on a device and it displayed the track info immediately but when i had about 7000 songs on the USB device it had to rescan the device each time it was installed."

and i have proved this on my car by actully counting the data items. i get just over 19,000 before the system starts to get confused.

 

Yes, I read it right the first time. 20k = 20,000 data items. I just don't feel the need to carry hundreds of gigs of songs around with me at all times. Is there even a chance I could listen to it all before I sold the car? Even further, do you really want to listen to everything you've got on your disk? I doubt it. Most people just fill their drive/ipod up and then don't listen to much of it. Seems like a terrible waste to me... Say what you want, but the cost/value of my hard drive still stands.

 

I just picked-up my spanking new Mellow Yellow Basic 2008 Mini on Friday. As my MA sat with me whipping out the piles of manuals that come with the car, a little hermetically sealed clear plastic bag emerged from the pile. He tore it open and said "Here's your Ipod adapter". Five minutes later, when we sat in the car he showed me most of the bells and whistles then hooked-up the Y-cable. Worked like a charm.

Meanwhile, I disconnected that Y-cable (I may have one for sale now) and plugged in my Creative Zen Vision M player. At first my player simply said "docked" while nothing showed on my MINI's display. Then I took the player out of its leather case which provided a firmer connection and...voila! She works like a charm. I get the full display and she plays everything I've loaded.

 

Latest Update - Even though my Creative Zen Vision M was playing music beautifully, it was taking a minute or two to load-up when I first started the car. I also found it a bit difficult to navigate through the menu what with 30 GB of music on the player. Thus I followed the OP's suggestion and bought a 4 GB Toshiba drive for $14 at OfficeMax and loaded a few tunes on to it. It is much faster at start-up and so far I am finding it easier to navigate through the car's menu system.

 

I've found the same thing with my usb harddrive. with about 80 GB it takes a minute to load and it's cumbersome going through the list of albums. Plus when it's cold out the drive will not load till the interior of the car warms up enough for drive to start working. As nice as it is to have my whole collection of music on one device it's just not very safe or practical. Probably do the 4 GB usb stick thing, maybe have a few for the different types of music I like.

 

peter314 - I'm just catching up on this thread, and it sounds like you've hashed things out with schatzy, but I just thought I'd offer my observations to the group:

I have the same drive (SanDisk 8GB Cruzer Micro - $25 at WalMart in Canada!) and originally also had trouble with it after uploading some music from my Windows machine at work. Since we're a Mac household, I then went ahead and ran the U3 uninstall utility. That seemed to do the trick!

I have also noticed though that when you copy files from a Mac you get those "ghost" files (e.g. "._xxx.mp3") and that the MINI stereo was trying to play those. When it did I'd get a few seconds of music then nothing - like the system was trying to figure out what to do with this file. Once these files are removed from the USB drive, everything worked great!!

The nice surprise is that AAC (.m4a) files play right off the USB drive!

On a side note, I wish BMW/MINI would update the iPod software of the stereo system to offer a scroll-by-letter option (like the phone book and schatzy's own filing system) when using the Artist or Album options. Even on my 30GB iPod, scrolling thru all the "A's" is a drag (I had no idea I had that many songs by "A" artists...), let alone trying to get to an artist in the latter half of the alphabet.

 

+1

Is even worse when you browse by song title.

 

Well recently I received the welcome kit from MINI and it include an Ipod Shuffle 1gb.

So I decided it should be just for the Mini, and tried plugging it with the standart dock-cable to charge its battery, and what a surprise I could see all the songs (name, album, band) that I have previoulsy loaded with iTunes and handle them with the wheel controls. To be clear the ipod is NOT set in external disk mode. And the audio is quite clear, as a normal USB drive I think.

I think it's a bit limited just to sort song by artist, or the random mode selected manually on the ipod.

This is the cable: http://reviews.digitaltrends.com/ima.../dock1_big.jpg

I just found a good place inside the armrest, but still need to hide the white line.

If the song has no tag from itunes it will appear illegible, but still will be played.

Regards

 

A USB port can supply a minimum of 5V @ 100mA. When commanded by a single device external device, can supply a maximum of 500mA. That is a standard USB port power spec.

 

Well Congratulations on getting this to work as you did. There may be a change in the software that allows this to work this way with a Shuffle.

This is only part of the story. There are actually two power levels for USB one is (low power) 100mA and the other is (high power) 500mA. The mini will only supply up to about 120mA and is thus a low power only USB. There are many mp3 players that require more than the low power only USB including the new iPod Nano and iPhone 3G.

 

I have created some playlists easily with Winamp. The files have .m3u extension and can be saved at the root of your flash memory. Easily accessible thru the list button of your Mini Radio.

Try it it's easy!

Frank

 

I'm currently running 30GB of wav files on a 64GB USB flash drive. Any more than 30GB results in the flash drive possibly not being able to be detected. It's a hit or miss situation. The most I was able to get was 50GB, but that may have been luck. I got greedy and kept putting more on there, then it stopped working.

The problem I'm having now is there's a second's worth of white noise in the gap between songs. Testing the sound files on a computer results in no errors. I've reformatted FAT32 a few times, but I'm wondering if the allocation unit size has anything to do with the noise, or has to do with the limited amount of files being read? I'll be testing that this afternoon.

Question: what files formats besides mp3, wav and aac have been confirmed to work? Any options besides wav for the folks that prefer lossless format?

 

The white noise issue has been resolved by using different software to convert (Audacity).

 

Update: the USB flash drive had issues supporting music files, sometimes as little as 20gb. I tried an older USB external drive (120gb) and this is working great, currently have about 100gb on there. Plugging in once results in the drive being detected immediately and all sound files detected. So for folks having problems with a particular drive, try another one.

 

After extended testing, I've found that if you want 100GB+ of music, the best route is to go with an external USB drive. If you're concerned about size, go with a 2.5" drive. I store my drive in the netting near the passenger side floor, where it's out of the way. File formats confirmed to work are:

• MP3
• M4A (AAC, a little better quality than mp3)
• WAV (lossless, but larger files)

After updating the drive with new files, the radio automatically detects the old ones and takes a few seconds to index the new files (actual time depends on how many there are). I currently have 120GB of music without external power needed, just power from the USB port.


Can anyone test with a larger HD? Preferably a Seagate or WD, 250GB or above?

 

The big question I have on this is "What year is your car?" As this does make a BIG difference on if it works as you say or not.

On my 2008 the car CAN NOT index more than 20,000 data points (i.e. artist, album, track name etc all added together) so with artist, album, track name and genre the car can only index approximately 5000 songs.

I currently have over 750 Gig of music and have tired up to a 500Gig WD Passport drive in my car and although it would see all of it it had trouble with it as it had to re-index every time i went past the 20,000th data point. Never had power problems either the drives would run off the USB without external power.

Later model cars may have more data storage capabilities and thus be able to index much more.

It is all dependent on what model year your car is and which USB module version you have in said car.