[TimCallihan]

I bought a 2023 760i to replace my 2017 540i. Absolutely love the car and still learning about the tech features. I have the B&W Diamond sound system and as a musician and studio owner, this system is the best I've ever owned. I've played drums for over 50 years and been on stages with great monitor systems. The immersive bass capability of the diamond system is similar to what I would feel on stage. Very tight kick drum response that's punchy but not a mess of rumbling low frequencies. The back of the seat provides that vibration I feel on stage but it's just the punch, nit an annoying continuous vibration. The B&W diamond system is worth every penny IMO. Bottom line, don't be afraid to turn it up and get inside the music.

My digital audio library was a mix of mp3, mp4, AAC, etc. and this system highlighted the compression of the audio. Yes, it's a debate about lossless compression and mp3 but low resolution mp3 files are a waste IMO. So, I re-recorded my entire music library (CD and vinyl) as FLAC format files and they sound great in the car. This effort forced me to go back to many albums I bought in the 60's and 70's and revisit how much I like them. I compared the sound to streaming Bluetooth and that wasn't as good as having high quality files stored natively for playback. Two questions:

One problem is that I can't get the car to recognize my playlists. I use Windows Media Player to create the playlists. It creates files that are m3u8 format. I made copies of the files and renamed them as m3u format since that seems more common and I've tried them as well. I put the files in a folder called "Playlists" and also tried putting them at the top level of the directory, i.e., not in a folder. Any idea what I'm missing here?

Second issue has to do with the way the system reads the files on the USB memory stick. I use a high quality (fast) 512 GB PNY stick and have 160 GB of audio data in FLAC format organized in the typical folder structure. I've been updating the files on that stick and the car seems to have a cache that doesn't clear. It remembers past file structure and doesn't recognize new files. Plus, this is intermittent and sometimes it does see the changes. I've seen some posts where owners say that you need to rotate through 4 or 5 other memory sticks with a couple of files and the car will then clear the cache. Then insert the primary stick and it reads all the files and correctly displays them in the screen menu. Anyone else experienced this issue and have a solution?

Thanks in advance for any help.

Tim

[omera60]

Hi Tim,

I also have a USB stick with music on it as FLAC both for quality purposes, my preference for the iDrive user interface to Carplay, and as a backup since the discontinuation of the "Music collection" function by BMW.

For the playlist issue; have you looked at this thread:

https://x3.xbimmers.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1816048

I know it is iDrive 7 but most of the time the requirements for file types etc. are the same.

For the cache, the head unit makes a cache based on the USB drive's name. If you change that iDrive will recognize it as a different USB and rechache everything on it. As far as I remember it had a cache of around 40000 songs before it recache's same drive. That is why people also recommend using several USB sticks to do that. I for one just rotate through several USB names on the same drive as I correct metadata etc. which in turn enables me to see the corrections immediately.

Let me know if you have any more questions, hopefully, this was helpful to you.

Omer