I purchased a 64GB Sandisk USB thumb drive to replace an old iPhone as a music source. I initially transferred about 45GB of music to the drive. When first inserted into the USB port in the arm rest (2018 230i) iDrive found all the music on the drive. Subsequently I found additional music files I wanted in the car. I pulled the thumb drive, stuck it into my desktop computer, and added the extra folders of music. When I plugged the thumb drive back into the car iDrive did not display the new files. Searching for them failed. Navigating the folders manually failed. I tried renaming the volume to see if that would cause iDrive to rescan the thumb drive. Nothing. I tried reformatting the drive and copying the files back onto it. No improvement. Apparently iDrive is unable or unwilling to refresh its content list for the device. I have no idea how to force it to do so. There are about 4,800 files on the drive in mp3 and mp4 formats with varying bit rate encodings. All the files originally on the drive work fine regardless of their encoding or bit rates. Any ideas on how to force iDrive to see the additional files?
Presumably our resident tech, Charlson, will have some suggestions. I looked up an owner's manual (you can look up yours on BMW's website) for a manual '18 230i under the 'Entertainment: Audio' section, didn't see anything that answered your particular issue. Did you try re-importing? The manual wasn't specific, but it kinda sounds like it might not re-import & write-over duplicates, but then maybe non-duplicate stuff would be automatically imported?
I find what works best for these type of issues is to first format the USB stick to FAT32 and the download all the MP3 songs. (BMW does not recognize MP4s). Make sure you have no sub folders either. Last thing would be to check for a software update for the vehicle media software. You can do this by going to BMW.com/update and putting your last 7 of the vin and seeing if there is one.
I attemped to download 105 CDs onto my 2017 540i 'Hi-Fi' system's 20Gb harddrive, but only 69 albums appear and can be played. I tried to download the ones not recorded with the first attempt, and the MP3 player said that they were already recorded inspiteof them not appearing in any search. A BMW Genius did not know what to do other than deleting the entire music collection and attempting to download all of the CDs again. If anyone can help in this regard, I would much appreciate it. A 20Gb harddrive should easily be able to handle 105 CDs - what went wrong? Likewise, I understand that MP3 player compress the music 11:1 which looses much sound quality. How can I download music without this quality loss?
How can I obtain the highest sound resolution by downloading my CDs? If I download the CDs into the car's hard drive the sound will be MP3 'compressed' 11:1 which will reduce the sound quality. Will the sound quality be improved if I download the CDs onto a flash drive losslessly? Your guidance would be appreciated.
