the4thlaw/bm3

MP3 playlist and album art processor for BMW's iDrive

bm3

MP3 playlist and album art processor for cars and nomad devices (originally for BMW's iDrive system).

Features

• Copy files from your local library to an USB stick, SD card or any local folder
• Integrate album covers from jpg and png files directly in the copied MP3 (does not affect the local library)
• Copy and verify the playlists on the target device so that they are recognised by the media player
• Handle exclusion playlists so that only parts of the library are copied (handy if you have more music than what fits on your device)
• Synchronization mode to incrementally update the target collection

Compatibility

The output has been tested to work on:

• BMW iDrive 5.x (e.g. 1 series F20 2016)
• BMW iDrive 8.x (e.g. 3 series G21 2022)
• VLC for Android 3.5.x

This is pretty generic software. It could very well work on other cars and players as long as they support M3U playlists (2020 Kia's don't, for example). If it works for you, drop an issue to add documentation.

System Requirements

Java 8 or later.

The software has been tested to work on:

• Windows (Java 11)
• MacOS (Java 8)
• Linux (Java 11)
• Synology
  • Requires a Java 8 package for DSM 6
  • Requires a community Java 11 package for DSM 7 (Java 8 seems to be bugged)

bm3's Issues

Wrong cover on some files

Multiple files from different albums and different artists were found to have irrelevant covers (all the same).

This should be addressed.

Add an option to choose how to deal with covers

• Embed them (default, recommended)
• Copy the jpg/png (not exclusive for first one)
• Ignore

Report size of copied MP3

The MP3s copied with on-the-fly album art embedding seem to be much larger that what would be expected.

It would be good to have debug statistics of the size taken (with common-math SummaryStatistics) and to investigate whether the size increase is reasonable.

Improved sync mode

Synchronisation should give three options:

• None
• Copy & delete (Copies new or modified files, removes files that should not be in the target)

Copy & delete should only remove music files and playlists, to avoid removing user files like autorun etc.