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      02-05-2011, 01:57 PM   #23
xDrive50i
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You can download and use iTunes (free) or you can use Windows Media Player to do pretty much the same thing. I personally use iTunes since I have a couple of iPod touches and a couple of iPhones.

As to a CD or DVD drive, you can get them for cheap as external USB drives and should be able to do all this on your laptop/computer.

I never bothered with the HDD storage as I find the USB memory stick to be far more convenient then having to constantly bother with updating the HDD in the car.

I use a program called EAC (Exact Audio Copy) to rip a CD and it hands the ripped WAV file over to iTunes. iTunes is instructed to compress the WAV file into m4a (lossless) format and labels the file according to EAC. EAC uses freedb to label the tracks. I verify that they are labeled correctly and start the rip process. The reason I use EAC versus the iTunes build-in rip function is that EAC verifies the actual rip by comparing your ripped versions CRC with their database and will tell you the rip accuracy. When you rip a LOT of CDs (my collection is somewhere around 1000 music CDs by now), you want to make sure they are ripped correctly. The iTunes rip function just rips them as fast as it can go without checking if the rip is actually good. Since music data on music CDs doesn't have a CRC that they can check to see if the read data is good, it can happen that your rip will have drop-outs or corrupted data which can manifest itself in all kinds of forms (e.g. drop-outs, glitches, stuttering or worse data that depending on your setup can even damage your speakers!). EAC on the other hand employs an oversampling technique to get the best rip possible.
Anyway, it's all automated and all I need to do is insert a CD into the drive and then request the track data via EAC from freedb and compare what they received from freedb with the actual CD sleeve. If I find discrepancies or I like to have something labeled differently, I make the changes and tell the program to go and rip the CD. Depending on the CD content, usually within 12 to 15 minutes the entire process is done and all the files are in m4a lossless compressed form in my library.
I keep all my music in m4a lossless format to get the best possible quality from them and store it on my multimedia server so that I can stream any song to any of my HTPCs, laptops, computers or other devices in my house.
For my car, I usually convert them into 128kbps mp3s when I transfer them onto the USB stick. This conversion is done at the time of the transfer.

Now what would really be neat is if the car had WiFi access so that I could either request song updates while I'm still in the garage or driveway or remotely update the songs in the car when I am siting at my laptop or computer...

Technically I can see that the problem with this is that the WiFi, OBC and HDD or USB memory will draw too much power to be powered while the engine is not running. But sometime in the future, I hope that they will go in that direction
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      02-05-2011, 03:16 PM   #24
dbs600
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Wow; thanks xDrive! Going to have to take a moment to digest all you've written...!
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      02-25-2011, 12:50 PM   #25
dbs600
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Could this be correct? Backing up my entire Music Collection from the car's hard drive - 80 CD's - took a mere 20 to 25 minutes, when each CD took about 5 minutes to store to same? I seem to have gotten just under 4 GB's worth...
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      02-28-2011, 08:58 PM   #26
xDrive50i
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Could be right, I don't know, I never used the HDD to store any music on it... But you have to consider that the drive had to first read your music files from the CD, then the OBC had to compress and then save your music to the HDD, so that process definitely takes longer!
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      09-21-2011, 02:09 PM   #27
deaddog
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Sorry if I missed it in the thread, but if you rip a CD to the hard drive int he car, how much compression does it impart? What if you transfer lossless from a usb stick to the hard drive - will it compress?
thanks
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      03-18-2013, 11:49 PM   #28
frieseke
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I wonder, could you upgrade the hard drive in the car? If it is just a 80gb drive in the car, what would stop you from pulling the drive and slotting in say a 500 gb ssd, or if we are lucky and BMW uses a 3.5" drive a 4tb drive and put all the music on it? Does any one know where the hard drive is? What kind is it? Are there any special things that BMW does to the drive for its control logic that can't be copied? I'd bit copy the drive and have 100s of gigabytes free to fill up with my entire music collection.
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