[pmw103]

Hi All,
My father has a UK F10 on order, one of the options he picked is

Loudspeaker system – BMW Professional 677

I am working through various internet forums etc, I was just wondering if any one had first hand experience of this system on the F10. I understand some improvements have been made for the F10.

We didn't opt for the DVD changer, we are planning to put everything on the hard drive, or USB sticks or at a push an IPOD / Iphone.

To date Dad's music collection has been ripped from CD at 128 bit via the AAC Encoder in Tunes. Just mainly for use at home on the computer and on his Iphone.

I have read that to get the best out of the BMW system he should be using a bit rate of at least 256.

Can the BMW system read files generated using the Apple Lossless Encoder?

Which encoder / bit rate would get the best results with the Professional speaker option?

Are there any other programs people would recommend to rip CD's rather than ITunes?

Any and all feedback is welcome!

Thanks for all your help
Cheers
Paul

[pmw103]

Hi All,
After further research I have come to the following initial conclusion.

The simplest approach, without getting to exotic with .flac files etc is to use Windows Media Player to rip CD's in WMA Lossless format.

I have found that ITunes will let you import WMA Lossless files into Itunes and convert them to Apple Lossless format, which is great as it means the best of both worlds. You just have to rip the CD's once but can use them both in Windows Media Player and on the Apple Ipod / Apple I phone.

Just a word of caution converting Apple Lossless files to Windows Media Player Lossless files does not appear so simple, at least out of the box, hence my decision to rip initially in Windows Media Player and convert to ITunes.

From looking at the various forums it would appear the best approach with BMW is to use a fast USB stick (Formatted in FAT32) to listen to files in a WMA Lossless format.

What is not so clear is if WMA Lossless files stored on the internal hard disk in the car can be played? The implication is that perhaps that doesn't work which is a bit of a shame, there is a suggestion that they only work from a fast USB stick.

The car will not arrive till late September / Early October so at the moment this is all very theoretical.

If any one has any experiences of listing to Lossless files via the hard drive or indeed a USB stick I would be very interested in any feedback.

In particular I would really like to know if any one has had any luck playing WMA Lossless files from the hardisk in the F10 Professional Navigation (609/ZGC) as that would be my preferred approach if it works!

Thanks for all your help!
Cheers
Paul

[EdM5]

Originally Posted by pmw103

If any one has any experiences of listing to Lossless files via the hard drive or indeed a USB stick I would be very interested in any feedback.

In particular I would really like to know if any one has had any luck playing WMA Lossless files from the hardisk in the F10 Professional Navigation (609/ZGC) as that would be my preferred approach if it works!

I'm looking for the same answer. I play my music via an iPod connected in the armrest. My entire music library was converted at 320 kbps to Apple AAC file format. But when I listened to some songs (got the Dirac 16 speaker, 600 w set), I wasn't entirely convinced of the sound quality. In noticed some minor distortions which I think is very annoying.
Obviously, nowadays disk capacity costs is hardly an issue, So I started converting my CDs to the Apple Lossless format. And those files sound just as good as the original CD recording. The downside is an 3X increase in filesize. So, my entire music library won't fit on the 160 Gb Ipod anymore.

With an average album size of about 350 Mb (that is based on Apple Lossless), it would be possible to load some 36 additional albums to the (12,5 Gb) harddisk via the Glovebox USB connection.
I tried that, but it didn't work. So, did anyone succeed to play lossless audio files, Apple or WMA, from the harddisk?

By the way: the manual specifies that files formats "WMA, MP3, M4A and AAC" can be loaded to the harddisk via CD/DVD or via USB. So, it should be possible I guess?