E70 Glove box aux input: file format

[petert]

I've searched the manual, xdrivers and xoutpost but not found this: can anyone else help:
What file format is required for a USB flash drive to use the glove box aux input?
Many thanks for anybody with definitive advice...
Peter T

[petert]

Just realised my question was a bit vague:
What I really want to know is if the USB has to be formatted in a particular format (FAT, FAT32 etc).
Other things that came to mind are: is 256kbps ok for the car to read?
and
is there an upper limit on file size (can't imagine there is but worth asking)?
Peter T

[X5Sport]

Do you get a choice with USB Flash (pen) drives? I thought they were FAT/FAT32 anyway. I don't think they're supposed to be anything clever like NTFS or one of the even more advanced drive formatting options as I'm told you need motherboard support not normally found in a car.

256kbps should be fine as that's just the sampling rate used during file production. iTunes now uses 256kbps by default I think. I know it used to be 128kbps but their data centres are now much bigger and there really is no reason to stick to the low sample rates these days. All my music conversions are at 256kbps and play just fine. Even those at higher sampling rates work perfectly.

There probably is a maximum single file size but that may be GB rather than MB. If you're copying to the onboard drive thn the music partition is approx 12.5GB of the 80GB hard drive capacity. The Satnav used a lot of the rest. I guess BMW assumed people would use an ipod (other generic MP3/AAC players are available) to hold everything rather than the car. Now that Apple have at long last and very belatedly open sourced their lossless ALAC Codec things might improve further audiowise.

EDIT - FAT16 max volume size is 2GB (4TB if 64k clusters selected), FAT32 is 2TB so I think your drives will format into FAT32 if they're more than 2GB. The maximum file size is 4GB in both cases. If your single file sizes go over 4GB then you need NTFS.

[petert]

Thanks. I just went with the default and was puzzled because the flash drive didn't play in either the E70 or our 2010 VW golf that also has a USB input.
Maybe I didn't give the BMW enough time to read the flash drive - I've heard it takes a while first time through.
Peter T

[petert]

Tried a different USB flash drive and it worked so it seems the original USB is goosed. Just a bit strange that it let me format it and then copy some music to it but neither car would then read it. I tried it in the golf first so maybe the golf did the damage (heh heh)...
Peter T