[kenl]

As per the title, when I select to play an album the songs are listed and play in alphabetical order. This was not the case in my R56.

A lot of albums need to be played in the correct order to flow correctly.

Anyone any ideas on how to sort this? Have I missed anything on setting up playback of albums?

Thanks

 

[MickSmith]

I get this when you have more than 1 album for the artist. I have found you need to select the album them scroll to the tracks beneath, click on that & it lists the tracks as the are on the album, select the 1st one & bobs your uncle . I found the if you have more than 1 album for the artist & you was to play all songs it does it alphabetically. Very frustrating. Would be interested if there is an easier way

 

[Hat]

I found the same, you need to select the album rather than the artist

 

[kenl]

I did that (at least I think I did).

Will try again tomorrow.

Thanks for the suggestion.

 

[Paul Hemsley]

Setting up the Hard drive with USB sticks is not as simple as it should be.
I managed to duplicate numerous tracks & deletion of tracks is both time consuming & risky as it's easy to delete the entire collection.
So I went back to basics,deleted the collection, & re-organised 7 USB sticks but after re-imputting 5 sticks the USB connection failed so i'm now booked in at my dealers for an investigation & hopefully a simple fix.They'll probably need to install a replacement Hard Drive but ...
I've worked with USB drives for years & have never encountered a connection issue so maybe there's a problem with the F56 IT hardware.
Anyway i'm still loving the Cooper despite the frustrating Media options.
All a question of trial & error, just not too keen on the error bit.

 

[kenl]

I still can't get an album to play in the correct order. Really rubbish when listening to the likes of Mike Oldfield or Pink Floyd, The Wall.

 

[QMark]

I tried to sort music into playlists, for importing via USB, but the system was having none of it. It imports the songs, but not the playlists, and only plays them alphabetically, based on song titles, so you get a really odd order of play. In fact, more random than Random! Did some hunting on the web, and someone advised exporting the playlist from iTunes as an xml file, and saving this on the same USB stick, but this didn't resolve it either. It imports the songs quickly, but is not interested in sorting them in any order.

 

[Hat]

Are you importing to the cars hard drive or playing direct from the usb? I dont have the hard drive option

 

[QMark]

Are you importing to the cars hard drive or playing direct from the usb? I dont have the hard drive option

It's the same problem with both: neither the external source nor the Music Collection (HD) recognise playlists. Once you plug in the USB it automatically starts to download the contents into the Music Collection, but it does this as a single dump of songs. It doesn't help if you try to load individual playlists one at a time, on separate USB sticks, either. If you put the USB stick into any other player, the folders are all present and correct. I am creating the FAT 32 formatted USB via iTunes, on an iMac; mostly AAC files.

 

[kenl]

i don't have the hard drive, just USB.

I think a very laborious solution would be to number/label the tracks for each album on the stick.

e.g.

A. No More Heroes
B. Golden Brown
C. The Raven
D. Peaches
etc.

Note, these are songs from my favourite artist - the Stranglers ;-)

I am very tempted to email MINI as this is an issue. I did not have this problem in my R56. Surely they can see that a music system should play an album as the artist intended.

 

[QMark]

It plays the songs on the hard drive in alphabetical order, regardless of the artists. So you would get 'A Hard Day's Night' followed by 'A Little Night Music', assuming your musical collection stretches from the Beatles to Mozart. I initially loaded about 1000 songs, before realising this. I am still hoping there is a quick fix for this, but have not contacted Mini yet (I've only had it a few days)

 

[Lawnmower3000]

It plays the songs on the hard drive in alphabetical order, regardless of the artists

Holy cow, that's ridiculous. Wonder who came up with that brilliant idea.

Could you add some detail on the filesystem and directory structure you have on your UFD? I haven't found any information on that subject in the owner's manual. I've been assuming that it works with FAT32, but there's no information that I've found on the limit of folder and file count, path and filename length, tolerance of spaces, etc. etc.

For those who are thinking it's "laborious" to change the file tags, it's not. In theory you can incorporate the pathname as prefix text to the actual title/file within the title tag. There are a lot of free utilities that can do this, such as MP3Tag. You can perform the operation on the entire UFD contents at once. The only downside is that the title display will now include the pathname.

 

[Hat]

i tried my USB again today, i dropped a load of random music on it from my itunes library using win explorer, some by selecting the individual album folder, some by selecting a whole artist folder with album folders inside

on the USB when plugged into the car (with no internal hard drive) i can search and select by album, artist, genre, composer, all songs and a couple more options that i can't recall just now. selecting an album presents all the tracks on that album in correct order. it doesn't seem to care if the files are in sub folders or not.

i'm not trying to be smart or clever here, but what this demonstrates is that the car software is capable of sorting music files on a USB correctly as you'd expect.

 

[olires]

My USB stick is structured as, e.g.

Guns N' Roses
--> Appetite for Destruction
----> 1 Welcome to the Jungle.mp3

Both Windows Media Player and cdEx (my preferred ripper) can easily name the tracks to your liking.

When I navigate the structure, I always navigate by folder. I'm just disappointed I can't do any of the folder selection (or artist, album) etc using the controller on the MFSW.

Oli

 

[QMark]

i tried my USB again today, i dropped a load of random music on it from my itunes library using win explorer, some by selecting the individual album folder, some by selecting a whole artist folder with album folders inside

on the USB when plugged into the car (with no internal hard drive) i can search and select by album, artist, genre, composer, all songs and a couple more options that i can't recall just now. selecting an album presents all the tracks on that album in correct order. it doesn't seem to care if the files are in sub folders or not.

i'm not trying to be smart or clever here, but what this demonstrates is that the car software is capable of sorting music files on a USB correctly as you'd expect.

The Music Collection (what the system calls its hard drive) does do all these search things, but then you have to want to listen to one particular album by one particular artist: that is the only time you get the songs in the order they were intended by the artist. If you search the artist only, you get an alphabetical list by song title, across however many albums you have downloaded. But most importantly, it just completely ignores the playlists sub directories when it is importing from the USB stick. I don't really buy or listen to music by the album or artist anymore. I will buy tracks piece-meal, and then save them in playlists: like 'Electro Chilled' or 'Late' or 'Summer 14'. These playlists work across all iPhones/iPods/iPads, and seem to work fine on other non-Apple systems too. Half the time I won't necessarily know the name of the artist or song, but I know exactly what to expect if I select 'Electro Chilled' or whatever. You can see playlists fine if you use a cable to connect the iPhone via the USB, but then it defeats the purpose of having the hard drive. (And no, you can't just download the iPhone content, as if it was a USB stick: I tried it and it doesn't let you). I thought it might be a quirk of using iTunes via a Mac, (although the USB stick is formatted FAT32) but the Mini manual says it does support AAC files, as well as MP3. And it does download the tracks without issue, as well as the title information. I have contacted Mini with the query, and will feedback any information that I get.

 

[Lawnmower3000]

If I'm reading this correctly, it appears that Hat and olires are experiencing different behavior of their audio system. Basically Hat says works okay and olires says no it doesn't. Could you two post up what version of the audio system you have? It also makes you wonder if there maybe was a running firmware change that made it work right in some cases.

I'm getting the base North American audio system (whenever the car decides to get on the boat) and will have a UFD ready to go to test how it works.

 

[Lawnmower3000]

Windows Media Player and cdEx (my preferred ripper) can easily name the tracks to your liking.

Yep. WMP can do what I described (prepend pathname to track title tag contents, though it's a bit clumsier than MP3tag. Not familiar with cdEx.

 

[Hat]

Here's a set of pictures taken of my screen. this first one shows the USB stick 'KINGSTON' selected

this shows the first level of search available:

this is searching by album name across all artists:

this is the track listing within an album, in album order

this is showing an artist selected (Doves) and the options available to select by album or all tracks

this is the selection of albums available for the artist

and again an album selected from the menu above, showing tracks in album order

the USB folder structure is taken directly from my iTunes library & is structured by artist\album

 

[olires]

The "search folder" item at the top should be an actual option rather than a heading. I just pick the top option and navigate the folder structure.

 

[Hat]

The "search folder" item at the top should be an actual option rather than a heading. I just pick the top option and navigate the folder structure.

yep it is & this is what takes you into a computer system folder structure where songs are listed alphabetically within a given sub-folder.