Onboard Music Collection Q
 

I just read the onboard music collection can store 16,000 songs. I wonder why BMW doesn't even promote this in their materials.

My question: how is this stored? Is it in solid state or in a hard drive?

I understand one must connect a USB flash drive or other solid state device filled with songs to transfer over your music.

Has anyone performed such a sync using their notebook computer or iPod?

It's kind of neat, but getting 16,000 songs onto a thumb drive and then transferring them over, sounds interesting, at best.

I believe it stores right to the hard drive. I'll never use my CD changer. Put a CD in once and you're done. Great feature.

Can't comment on the ipod question, sorry. I'm still in the 20th century. I'm getting here slowly but surely.

It is on hard drive.

In the glove box, there is a USB connector which you can use to transfer music from your usb key or usb hard drive. The music will get organized by genre, album, author, as well as by the folders as you had them on your usb device.

I have 2010 335xi with the new iDrive, it has 12GB capacity. I've transferred 500 songs of average length, and they only took 3.5GB. How many songs you can have really depends on the size of the file for each song, which is a factor of setting on your CD ripping software.

Alexmish states the facts correctly. For reference, we maxed our HD with 128 kbps mp3 songs (~12GB total), which came to roughly 3,500 tracks (~70% "rock/pop" genre). Actual use will vary, most likely related to the type of music (song length).

Because it ain't so? Do the math. At typical mp3 encoding rates, you will be lucky to get a little over 3,000 tracks on the puny ("12.5" GB) HDD in '10 X5s. The '10 Cadillac SRX has a 40 GB HDD - another example of BMW cheesing out on options and little touches to save a buck. "Ultimate Driving Machine" no doubt. "Ultimate User Features Ute" no chance.

I believe X5 has an 80 gig HDD.

Ours, delivered October 31, 2009, is only 12.5 GB. :confused:

Edited Feb. 2: That is, only 12.5 GB available for media storage. HDD may well be a total of 80 GB?

X5 Hard Drive
 

Hi. Thought I'd share info on this hard drive I read somewhere on the Web. Don't ask me where I read it as I cannot remember the link to it.

If I remember correctly, the X5 comes with a 80GB HDD. The capacity is broken down in the following manner:

65GB - reserved for Navigation (Maps, POIs, etc.)
12.5GB - for music files copied from CDs or hard drives
2.5GB - for HD Radio and CDDB (for identifying song info)

Hope this helps :thumbup:

I've been meaning to check the capacity, but keep forgetting. On Edmunds.com, it lists the HDD at 80GB without any break down. Above breakdown is probably correct. So getting 16k songs on 12.5GB would mean some really low quality audio.

With a mix of rip rates (some at 128, 160 and 192) I have 753 songs (about 70+ CDs worth) on 3.72 GBs; so, keeping the same kbps mix ratio should yield about 2484 songs in 12.5 GBs. So far, I haven't really noticed sound quality difference but I have not really focused on comparing (all sound great). Of course, if all at 128 would yield a lot more but no where close to 16k songs. Anything below 128 rip rate would probably not sound very good. My CA tells me that stored nav points use up some of the 12.5 (unverified). FWIW