[Rocketman123]

Does anyone know the limitations on reading music through a USB stick? I'm not talking about the hard drive capacity - I mean the actual size of the stick or number of tracks or whatever limitations it has on reading from the USB.

The reason I'm asking is that I have a 256 GB USB stick with about 230 GB of actual content and about 50,000 tracks. It looks like only about half of the tracks/artists actually show up. I couldn't find anywhere in the manual that talks about this - it only seems to talk about how much content can be stored on the car's hard drive. Anyone know?

Thanks

[Assassin]

Using 128gb / 18,000+ tracks ....no issues. It may accept and work with a larger capacity but may only address up to 128gb? Only way to find out it either trial and error reducing the number of tracks each time or contact your local $tealer and ask their BMW expert to find out the definitive size. And I thought 18,000 was far too many!

[AP]

Wondering if the formatting if the drive helps or hinders in anyway.( as mentioned above hopefully a bmw "genius" can provide the technical answer

You try NYFS versus fat32 and see if the car reads it any differently

[G22b58]

At least my owners manual (2021 M440) specifies that track information for:
* 16000 tracks per USB drive
* 40000 tracks in total
can be stored in iDrive.
Note that the G22 (and I believe 3-series MY2021+) can not transfer tracks to iDrive, but the information (tags) is stored.
(This stored information also gives us problems to get it updated, but that is covered in another thread.)

[panki_86]

I am using 256GB Sandisk Ultra fit in my 2020 M340i.
Formated in NTFS, because i have few movies on it, and around 300 music videos. I don't know how much tracks.
Working like a charm.

[Rocketman123]

Thanks for the input. I'm a little confused between what the iDrive can hold (I'm assuming that means it's on an internal hard drive or solid state storage system) vs what it is reading directly from the USB. Or maybe it doesn't read directly from the USB without transferring it to the hard drive? Need to think about that.

I might see what the "Geniuses" say - plus do some trial and error. Pretty much all of my tracks are mp3 so converting them would be very cumbersome.

It's going to be a little difficult though because it's not obvious what is being excluded. For example, I have each artist organized in a folder. When I browse the folders it stops at the letter "M" - so in other words there are no artists listed with letters N through Z. However, then when I look in the individual folders it will also exclude certain albums (also in folders). So it's going to be an interesting experiment. Not sure if that makes sense.

[Rocketman123]

I'm confused - how does it work? Why doesn't it just read straight off the USB? It has to store it on the iDrive first? 16,000 songs is nothing (I have about 130,000 so my USB with 50,000 is downsizing)...

[Rocketman123]

PS - yes, I know I'm crazy about this obsession...

[Sandpiper]

Originally Posted by Rocketman123

I'm confused - how does it work? Why doesn't it just read straight off the USB? It has to store it on the iDrive first? 16,000 songs is nothing (I have about 130,000 so my USB with 50,000 is downsizing)...

TL;DR: So the iDrive OS needs to "index" the stuff on your USB drive. If it directly reads from the USB drive then it will be slower.

In order to make the experience of searching/navigating your music collection quick and easy the iDrive system needs to build a "table of contents" and organize all the details for each and every file. The reason is audio file formats can be structured in many different ways. For example, the album art cover can be stored anywhere in .mp3 file. Meaning it can be stored at the beginning of the file (best option), at the end of the file (second best option), or somewhere in the middle of the file (this should never happen, but it's possible). Audio files are complex so it reads all the important information that it thinks it needs and stores it neatly in the iDrive system. This is called "indexing". So when you are playing some music it will show you the Title, Artist, Album, Cover Art using the neatly stored data, and only the audio data will need to be read from the USB drive.

If you did not have indexing you will notice large gaps between tracks. You will see delays in the artwork loading, delays in the title/genre/album loading, slowness in scrolling the list of tracks/albums, etc.

[Rocketman123]

That is very helpful, thank you! I will experiment and report back with more questions I'm sure!

[Rocketman123]

Well I finally optimized my USBs. It took some experimenting. I tried calling the Genius line but they were closed for the holidays, so I took matters into my own hands.

I determined it had nothing to do with the formatting (tried all 3 types: NTFS, exFAT, FAT32) with no difference.

However, it seems consistent with Sandpiper's post. The limitation seems to be the amount of metadata that can be stored in the iDrive (cover art, track names, artist, etc).

I fiddled around erasing and adding files not only with one USB but multiple other USBs (as another post suggested). Eventually my USB seemed to re-index (not sure the technical term). Then I gradually added files and kept track of the number of files and total size. I experimented with different collections of music to get a variety of trial cases.

Results: It wasn't limited to an exact number of files or total size. I presume this is because the size of all the metadata is different with each collection of songs. Eventually I ended up with 26,000 tracks and 120 GB (downselected from 110,000!). It is storing the metadata, but there's no practical way to know if 100% of it is there. The manual indicates it should be about 16,000:

Mine is a 2023 model:

"Information on all titles, for instance artist, genre or title, as well as playback lists, are transmitted into the vehicle. The transmission of the information may take some time, depending on the USB device, file size, and number of titles.
During the transmission, the titles can be called up via the file folder. The information for approx. 16,000 titles can be saved in the vehicle. Titles with integrated Digital rights management (DRM) cannot be played."

Conclusion: The system seems to ignore USB files which cannot be indexed. This is contrary to my previous car (2016 VW Golf R) which simply excluded the metadata but still allowed you to play the files when you searched folders up to 256 GB. This seems like a silly limitation for a more expensive and newer car, but I guess not many people are crazy enough to want as many songs as I do...

Irony: After all that my iDrive has suddenly stopped recognizing my USBs or bluetooth audio. Going to write a separate post on that.

Thanks for everyone's help!!!

[Z_Victor1]

Originally Posted by Rocketman123

............Irony: After all that my iDrive has suddenly stopped recognizing my USBs or bluetooth audio. Going to write a separate post on that.
Thanks for everyone's help!!!

I have discovered that the file limit on an exFAT USB stick is 16,384 files.

16,384 being a signed 16-bit number (15 bits plus sign bit), this is internal to the exFAT file structure.

I have recorded just over 32,000 music tracks split between TWO SanDisk Ultrafit 512GB USB 3.1 drives.
One in between the cupholders and one (vis a USB C-A converter) in the central armrest.
Each has approx 16,000 music files in FLAC format.
The car recognises and plays music from both sources with no issues and with superb clarity.

I have spent a long time tweeking this and tried recording more files onto the drives, but ended up with all sorts of odd issues.
Keeping it under the 16,384 limit worked for me.

Hope this helps...

Good luck.

[Carboraine]

Originally Posted by Z_Victor1

I have discovered that the file limit on an exFAT USB stick is 16,384 files.

16,384 being a signed 16-bit number (15 bits plus sign bit), this is internal to the exFAT file structure.

I have recorded just over 32,000 music tracks split between TWO SanDisk Ultrafit 512GB USB 3.1 drives.
One in between the cupholders and one (vis a USB C-A converter) in the central armrest.
Each has approx 16,000 music files in FLAC format.
The car recognises and plays music from both sources with no issues and with superb clarity.

I have spent a long time tweeking this and tried recording more files onto the drives, but ended up with all sorts of odd issues.
Keeping it under the 16,384 limit worked for me.

Hope this helps...

Good luck.

Question on this - I have an i7 and am struggling with this same thing. I am able to put more than 16,000 tracks on an exFat formatting usb drive (I have a 4TB SSD) so it doesn't seem like exFat is limiting me but I have the same issue the OP and others mentioned... iDrive seems to randomly decide which tracks are indexed. There are two USB-C ports in the front arm rest (and two more in the rear arm rest and millions more scattered around the car). I can test this of course but does iDrive have any limit regarding the number of usb-c drives you can populate with 16,000 files have the files show up seamlessly (ie one list with all artists/albums tracks across the drives)? I have no issue buying a bunch of 512GB thumb drives. I was guessing some ports are charging only or it might not see all of them simultaneously but that was just an assumption.

also any limits on artists and albums? can you have 16,000 albums with 1 track each? If anyone here knows, lol...

[G22b58]

In my G22 with iDrive 7, two of the ports (cup holder and arm rest) are wired for data. I haven't tried 2 devices at the same time but suspect I had to select one source at a time. What I do know is that iDrive 7 keeps a number of devices indexed in memory. That is in fact troublesome when updating e.g. the content of a playlist. The car thinks the cached file is up to date. The cache seems to hold 5 device ID's in the cache (without caring of the device name).
So to force a re-indexing I use a round robin stack of 6 devices when updating. (I only use one at a time in the car.)

So the other way around I think I could use a stack of 5 devices to switch between (2 connected, but check your owners manual for your number of data-ports) without the need for re-indexing. The manual states max about 16000 titles per device but 40000 in total.