Still no progress on this from the dealer. What I’ve done in the meantime is get myself a 128GB Sandisk flash drive from Amazon for £15. I’ve used the backup from my NAS on a portable hard drive to convert all the FLAC to 192kbps mp3 (that’s good enough for the audio system in the car) and copied the resulting 65GB worth of mp3 on to the flash drive. Plugging that in to the car’s USB port works perfectly; I get all the artwork and track information and the search by artist, album etc all works fine too. It does take about half a minute after starting the car for the search functionality to be active, I’m assuming that is the time it takes for the car to read the metadata in the files on the flash drive? dbPoweramp took about 9 hours on a fairly fast computer to convert the FLAC collection to mp3 and about 1.5 hours to copy the mp3s to the flash drive.
I’m reasonably happy with this solution but the workflow to get any new music on to the flash drive is a bit more of a faff compared to syncing an iPod with an iTunes library but at least I’ve got my music in the car again.
@GavinB if you are thinking of doing the same for your car, I noticed today that the car system doesn’t handle multi-CD albums well. If the metadata Disc tag says 1/2 and 2/2 and the tracks are numbered from 1 in both of them then the car system is ignoring the Disc tag and ordering them by track number so the 1’s come first then the 2’s and so on. Quite annoying especially with live albums so I’ve edited the metadata to start the track numbers on the second disc following on from the first
Thanks, @elverdiblanco, I might give that a try, although I’ve had problems with this approach in other cars in the past. As I’ve mentioned, I tend to just listen to music in shuffle mode in the car, and when I’ve tried it on USB sticks previously, the shuffle isn’t actually shuffle, it plays the tracks in exactly the same order (albeit not the numerical track order). Argghh! I’ve therefore got the impression that many cars are really only set up to work well with Apple. I hope this is changing.
What did surprise me is that the car system would play FLAC even at 24/96 quite happily. I just converted my library to 192Kbps mp3 for the car so it would fit on a £15 128GB flash drive rather than a much more expensive 1TB flash drive and as I said mp3 at that resolution is good enough for the car system, to my ears at least. BMW really are Apple focused, even the dealerships. When my partner bought her 2 series the BMW Genius didn’t know how to pair an Android phone with the Bluetooth in the car
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