Quote:
Originally Posted by Wristdoc
After reading your posts I attempted to download some songs in the AIFF format however they did not appear when looking for the files on the iDrive 7. I am going to try again in the FLAC format...do you just load them off of a USB or have them on the USB drive? I am hoping the FLAC files will appear...appreciate any advice!
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One BMW shortcoming is they do not publish full specs in regards to the audio support. That said according to the online 8-series manual states that only the following formats are supported via USB: MP3, MP4, M4A, M4B, AAC and WMA. Thus, there is a theory anything else is somehow converted to one of these formats during playback. I personally doubt that as the transcoding power to do so in stream is intensive and there is absolutely zero drop off, digital burps etc. when listening to FLAC sources. Rather I believe they just state the standard formats vs having to deal with support issues for the more exotic ones.
I've read elsewhere on Bimmerpost that AIFF does play in the earlier models but does not in the latest gen it. I am already FLAC oriented for a high-resolution file type so the issue was not a concern for me. That said I did get bit on my first purchase of a SSD drive for the USB-C port in the center console. It was a 2TB LaCie USB-C drive (STHK2000800) and it was not recognized by the car whatsoever regardless of OS format of the drive (NTFS, Fat 32 or ExFAT) as I tried them all.
I've had great experience with LaCie drives (although now owned by Seagate) and did the purchase based on it being one of the highest capacities available in a small footprint. However, digging into the details it has a chipset specifically designed for the Windows and MacOS to support the highest transfer speed possible. So I returned it (have to love Amazon) and picked up a 1TB Crucial SSD that is built to be 100% agnostic (supports Linux) and it works like a champ (
https://amazon.com/gp/product/B07YD5...?ie=UTF8&psc=1) formatted in ExFAT as I have both Windows and Mac's in the house.
Primarily everything runs off of the Crucial SSD in the center console but I did test out importing some albums to the iDrive hard disk. From either source everything works as expected. Not sure what format you have on your USB drive your trying but if it does not show up in the USB media menu regardless of the AIFF files that may be the issue. NTFS, Fat32 and ExFAT should all work.