Hi all,

I used to have iPhone 3GS, whenever USB was plugged it would immediately find all the music, with artists, album art and everything necessary. I moved to android. Samsung Note with Android 2.3..

Now when I plug in the USB, it sees it just as a USB drive.
1. I cannot even choose the External SD, usually I have a folder called external_SD on my root folder, but here I don't.
2. If I copy some music to my internal memory, then the only choice I have is to choose a Search folder, then I have to specify a specific file (not a folder), then it plays this file. However, if I press on Artists it shows me only ALL ARTISTS and VARIOUS ARTISTS, if I press on Titles it will show me ALL the titles from the whole drive, including the ringtones and everything. So it's very not convenient like this. I do have all my music tagged properly with artist, title, genre and etc..

I also tried to connect USB as a MASS STORAGE, then its same problem, but I can choose the External SD folder.

Any ideas?

Thanks.

 

Take you music off of I tunes - and copy it to a folder and put it on a USB stick

If there are numbers in front of the song titles edit them out

Then your phone is free and just leave the USB stick in the car

 

1. I'm not using iTunes.
2. I don't feel like managing my music over 2 devices.
3. it's not what I asked.

 

Vladi Trop - My android phone ( EVO 4g) doesn't worth with it either. I have a 16gig usb stick with all my music and that works perfectly (as long as everything is specifically .mp3 file format).

I do use my phone with a bluetooth fm transmitter to play podcasts over the radio and that works fine. You could do the same for music if you chose to.

 

Well, in that case it would be easier just to use AUX cable.

However, what is 'perfectly'? How do you choose a song? do you have a working list of artists or you just choose a folder and then a file?

 

You can include playlists on the stick if you like, but even without them you can search / filter by genre, artist, album, etc from the ID3 tag info. Only thing that's notably lacking vs. using an iPod in my experience is the lack of album art when using a USB stick.

It's a shame MINI drinks the Apple Kool-Aid while giving the shaft to Android owners. But that's a discussion for another thread.

 

Yes, totally agree about Apple.

What could be the reason it doesn't work the same when plugging the phone? I mean its same USB stick for this purpose, no?

 

Only iOS is fully integrated with the MINI stereo (using the Y cable). Anything else on the USB is accessed as USB mass storage, but it should be able to find and play mp3 and some other music formats.

At my workplace, we have a Samsung Galaxy Note with Android 4.0.4, and I don't know if it behaves the same as yours with 2.3. The device has two USB modes: MTP (Media Transfer Protocol) and "traditional" USB mass storage. The default mode is MTP. If you plug it into a computer, it only mounts as a volume if the computer has MTP device drivers. I suspect that the MINI doesn't know how to connect to MTP devices. Most Android devices only have USB storage mode and wouldn't have this issue.

The Galaxy Note can be switched to USB storage mode, which is more likely to work with MINI. On our unit, this is the procedure:

1. Start with the USB cable disconnected
2. Open Settings ==> More... ==> USB utilities
3. Tap on "Connect storage to PC" button
4. Connect the USB cable
5. Tap on "Turn on USB storage" button

The problem is, the USB reverts to MTP mode after disconnection. It would be practically unusable if you had to do these steps every time you connect it to the car.

 

rkw, thanks for the detailed reply.

However, I know about the Mass storage option, I actually also talk about it in my first post.
Problem is that I have to choose a specific file (and not a whole folder) and I have to jump from one file to another when I wanna switch music and cannot search by artist and no album art neither (but this is minor).

 

Unfortunately now that most android phones have 2 SD cards (1 (SD) internal memory really and one (SD_Ext or External_SD) it becomes more of a problem.

The MINI software was designed to look at the closest folder to root that it can on any specific device. This is where the problem comes in.

Now on my Motorola Droid X, SD (internal memory) does not exist so there was not problem such as the OP is having.

I have just upgraded today to Motorola Droid 4 which has both SD and SD_Ext. So I suspect that I will have a problem such as the OP. I have not had time since picking up the phone at lunch time to do any testing but I will be doing testing of this issue this weekend an hopefully coming up with a solution.

Vladi Trap can you please post here the exact Android Version numbers here so I have that info to assist you with I.E. I am looking for the following (these are my numbers and your should be different, and you may not have all of these but give me what you can)

System Version: 6.13.219.XT894.Verizon.en.US
Android Version: 2.3.6
Baseband Version: CDMA_N_04.07.01R LTEDC_U_07.1F.00
Kernal Version: 6.5.1_167_DR4-1_M1-219
Build Number: 6.5.1_167_DR4-1_M1-219

 

double post deleted

 

Android version: 2.3.6
Baseband Version: N7000XXLB2
Kernel Version: 2.6.35.7-N7000XXLC1-CL1003701 se.infra@SEP-52 #2
Build number: GINGERBREAD.XXLC1

I'm going to update to Android 4.0, for some reason don't manage for now.

 

Take your music and transfer it to any pc...then put it on a memory stick

I do not understand 2 devices......after you put the music on a stick....you never have to mess with it....

 

Until you buy a new song. Or decide to create a new playlist.

And it does not solve the problem of not having an interface available to select songs by artist or album or whatever.

 

It's all because MINI's are Apple-centric. They've found that MINI drivers have one of the highest % of iKool_Aid drinkers, therefore, they really don't care if you don't use some version of i(insert device of the month here). Now some will try to tell you that Android devices all use different protocols, and they can't build software for all of the different ones available, but I call BS. They will all run just fine over the bluetooth protocols.

 

With the USB I can select any album, artist, song etc.

If you get a new song, just unplug the usb....stick in your computer...and copy the song to the folder

 

this! usb is the way to go!

 

So you do have to mess with it (contrary to your earlier post). And the solution you describe explicitly requires the music to be managed over 2 devices (the computer and the USB stick). The OP specifically stated they did not want to do that. (And depending on how the song purchases are being made, a third device may be involved - his phone).

The OP can get to any song as well, but it is not easy with the basic interface you get when using a plain memory device. Vladi is hoping to find a way to emulate the functionality of using an i-device via an Android device.

 

Oh and with a USB Stick I can not play Slacker, Pandora, Google Music, Amazon Music or what ever other streaming system I want.

And with a USB Stick I can not play the music while walking somewhere.

And with a USB Stick I can not play the music in my office with just a pair of powered speakers.

There are a lot of reasons that a USB Stick does not work.

 

Vladi Trop, I just want to let you know i am still working on this issue but have not come up with a solution yet as I had some unexpected family matters to attend to this past weekend.

Of note though for you is that my car does not see my Droid 4 at all. It saw my Droid X without problem. So I have to figure that out before i can get to finding the External SD card.

 

Thanks for everyone who is trying to look for a solution.

As for the USB subject, as I said (and some more users here), it's not what I asked. but for the record, it's a really bad solution/suggestion, because of the reasons already explained. I asked for a solution for my problem, not for suggestions how to do otherwise, these suggestions I know myself also

 

This would be consistent with my earlier post, where I speculated that MINI Connected doesn't know how to interface with MTP devices. Here is some background about MTP:
http://www.androidcentral.com/ics-fe...and-how-set-it
http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2011/12/h...or-file-access

 

Well that very well may be but both the OP and myself are running Gingerbread NOT ICS and as such MTP should not be a problem. MTP did not come into effect until Honeycomb and at that point you could select between USB Mass Storage and MTP on most devices.

also of note

1. I do not have MINI Connected in my car it is way to old for that.
2. MINI's Require FAT32 Formatting for their USB Sticks or USB Hard drives.
3. When I hook my phone up to my Windows XP computer it shows 3 new drives.
A. MotoCast Drive - CDFS formatting as Drive E:
B. MOI - FAT32 formatting as drive I:
c. Removable Disk - FAT32 Formatting as Drive K:

So when my MINI sees the phone the first thing it is seeing is the CDFS formatted drive and well it gets confused not knowing what to do with it. And as such can not display any files or folders so there is no way for me to switch to another folder or memory location.

So it seems to have nothing to do with MTP as the drives it shows on my computer are still USB Mass Storage not MTP (they would not be assigned drive letters if they were MTP)

My next work is to find out if I can force change the drive letters around to see if I can force it to see the External SD Card which is currently drive K: (highest listing on my computer. My initial thoughts on this are that it is not going to work well at least after a restart as drive letters are assigned by the computer not the device being attached. But it is worth a try to start with.

 

I'm still not seeing what the problem is with just streaming the music via bluetooth.

 

I have a 2008 car that does not have MINI Connected so there is no way without aftermarket parts to do that.

The OP has not stated if he has MINI Connected or not but if not then again without aftermarket parts there is no way to do that.

I have tried a number of aftermarket Bluetooth to audio adapters and none of them sound as good as a direct connection via USB to the car. heck they even sound worse than a 3.5mm to 3.5mm cable out of the headphone socket to the AUX input.