USB Dongle Size

B

bounax

Member
 Paisley
Come Wednesday evening I will be the proud owner of a new Z, with the USB option. I want to buy a new dongle for my tunes, but i'm not sure what the maximum size is that the car can accept. I suspect its 32GB but im not sure & I dont want to buy one thats just to big, and there-for a waste of money....

Any comments gratefully recieved.

Chris
 
I've found a 16GB one that i quite like the look of, but I've heard a few reports of people saying that the bigger the USB stick, the greater the likelihood that it wont be recognized by the device its plugged into :?
 
I think if you buy one from PC World or Argos, you can change it if it doesn't work.

My 8 GB is just over 50% full with over 200 tracks.
 
and the bigger it is, the longer the stereo takes to read the contents, I would say 8 gig is a reasonable size.
 
8 Gig should be fine - there are some good deals out there for bigger sizes though so I'm being tempted... is there a website that will give the maximum size that the car can recognize?
 
bounax said:
8 Gig should be fine - there are some good deals out there for bigger sizes though so I'm being tempted... is there a website that will give the maximum size that the car can recognize?
Click to expand...

I have just checked the manual. It doesn't mention about the size, but USB interface can store information up to 4 different USB devices.
 
The manual does not state a maximum size of memory to use but it does state that a USB hard drive shouldn't be used. The first attempt at using the USB was with a 4 gig stick, this worked fine but was too small. I then purchased an 8 gig stick, however once loaded with music from windows media player the car could not read it. I exchanged it for another make, which worked, just not very well, it took about 3 minutes to play every time I started the car

In the end I had to manually copy songs without directories onto the stick and this seems to work okay.
 
My USB stick is BMW own brand (65 41 2 179 284). Even 8 GB stick works perfectly okay, i.e. no delay and load instantly. Each folder has 1 album.
 
I have a 32gb one working in my 1 series without issue, would suggest you get a fairly decent one and organise you music otherwise there will be delays.

If oyu use itunes then this app is brilliant for exporting playlists and music from itunes

http://www.ericdaugherty.com/dev/itunesexport/
 
I had an e89 for a week with the USB option, I just plugged in a 250GB HDD (WD Passport) and it worked great. No massive delay (although I'm sure a stick would be quicker on start up) when selecting stuff. Worked really well, even though if you say the manual says it won't work, it infact did!
 
Same as the manual states that you cannot connect and download from an IPOD using the USB but I used mine without any problems and dumped 12gb of music onto my car's hardrive.
 
i bought a 32gb 1 of ebay, for my parrot kit, it was crap quality and kept locking up, in reality 8 or 16gb will be plenty big enough
 
I've had no problems with an 8GB micro sdhc card in a usb adapter, but the car doesn't seem happy with a 16gb card. It recognises it, but only a subset of the folders / music files.

A few earlier replies talked about organising music files in particular ways to get things to work properly. What have people found works best?

I currently have top-level folders for each artist, then a sub-folder for each album, then mp3 files within each of those. Each mp3 file has the artist/album/title encoded within it too, and the car seems to use that data rather than the folder names, so might I be better just dumping all the files directly in the root folder?
 
I found on th larger capacity, say 8 gig, that having folders Artist/Album/song-artist as per the norm didn't work very well, it seemed to take ages for songs to load. In the end I set up the so there was no folders just song title-artist and have had no trouble with it

I also found that when I connected my iPod, it would recognise the songs but on random play only played 20 or so songs before repeating. This got so annoying and so ditched the iPod the the USB memory stick
 
Although not an E89 our 120d happily works with a 16gb USB stick.
I have found that brand and price paid have a direct correlation with successful usage
I always use Sandisk and have never had any problems
 
MyNamesNotBob said:
I had an e89 for a week with the USB option, I just plugged in a 250GB HDD (WD Passport) and it worked great. No massive delay (although I'm sure a stick would be quicker on start up) when selecting stuff. Worked really well, even though if you say the manual says it won't work, it infact did!
Click to expand...

I just installed an old 20GB portable USB hard disk (one of the old small ones) and it works great. You should be able to pick them up even cheaper than a USB stick but maybe they are not as fast or reliable.
 
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