[maughan67]

Until yesterday, I had a 2016 F30 340i. For music in the car, I was using a 128GB USB thumb drive. The artist folder was indexed by the car’s software by reference to the “album artist” tag in each MP3 file. All fine - I had nice neat, consistent folders. (This is also the same in my 2013 X3.)

My new G22 M440i is indexing the files differently. It is clearly using the “artist” (not “album artist”) tag to index and sort the files. The problem with that (from my perspective) is that when ripping and sorting the 900+ albums in my music library I carefully ensured that all the “album artist” info is consistent and only identifies (unsurprisingly) the artist that released the album. The “artist” tag, however, also notes any contributing artists, and/or is prone to identifying an artist slightly differently (eg The v the, or aha v A-ha, etc etc). So my new car won’t sort things neatly as I want, ie all album artists grouped together, regardless of any contributors and where I have ensured that all spellings etc are harmonised. Result: a huge muddle of variations of artist names and/or a whole load of irrelevant contributing artists. Plus affected albums don’t play as whole albums.

I have a workaround. I have created a duplicate folder and used mp3tag to change all of the “artist” tags to be the same as the existing “album artist” tags. (Witchcraft.)

But, before I delete the old folder and lose all the original “artist” information, does anyone please know whether it is possible to get iDrive 7 to index by reference to “album artist” instead of “artist”?

(I doubt it is possible, but worth asking!)

Incidentally, and of possible interest to any fellow tag geeks... My F30 HUD listed tracks by reference to “title”, ie song name. But... my X3’s HUD uses file name, so most of the song title was taken up with “01. [artist name] - ...” I had to find a script to auto-change all track names to remove the track number and artist name. Seems like an odd software difference. Clearly, based on that and my G22 issue described above, BMW does not seem to have a consistent tag indexing/sorting protocol.

Thanks in advance for any comments or help!

Matt

[maughan67]

I amended the tags. Easy enough with mp3tag (or similar). It then took a long time to copy the amended files back onto the USB, but no problems.

However, when I then put the amended USB back into the car, the iDrive refused to re-index the files, so the previous indexing and display persisted. I read about various options, some more drastic than others. But I found an easy(ish) solution.

See this thread: https://g05.bimmerpost.com/forums/sh...7&postcount=37

I would be interested to know if anyone else has encountered these various problems with the indexing and tagging on iDrive 7 in a G2x.