USB -> hard drive works
Hi guys
I bought a portable hard drive (Formac 250GB) last week and can confirm that it works well in an S5 with the AMI -> mini USB cable. The cable was overpriced at £25 but I couldn't find anywhere other than an Audi dealer who had it! I believe there's a mini and "normal" USB so order carefully.
I've currently got around 7000 MP3 converted as Lame -V0--vbr-new (~230 kbps) on my HD and they sound very good through the B&O stereo. I've saved my MP3s as "Artist\Album\nn song name.mp3" where nn = track number, so it's easy to navigate the directory tree. The only (minor) things to note are:
- playback is NOT gapless (there's silence between one song and another) so mixes and albums where the songs merge/flow are interrupted (and this is with Lame gapless info, so it's the stereo not the MP3s)
- it can take a while (5-10 secs, guesstimate as haven't timed it) for the display to show files in a "full" directory (i.e. where there are many (hundreds) of files/subdirs) and become ready for input: this makes going "up" from album -> artist -> ALL artists a bit slow... you can get a "loading directory name x of y" type message sometimes. I think this too is an Audi issue as the HD on a PC shows a directory much more quickly.
Otherwise it's good (the above really are minor). The sound is transparent (i.e. the same, as you'd expect as this bitrate in a CAR!) compared to a normal CD and navigating the tree is easy (assuming you use some logic when setting it up). For under £100 (bought new, ignoring cost of AMI etc!) you can have a HUGE archive of music in your car which seems pretty good value compared to other systems I've used (e.g. Phatbox) in the past.
One other thing - I split my drive into two partitions and the stereo defaulted to the first partition on the drive (which has my MP3s, I guessed it would). I can't select partition 1 or 2. I also formatted as FAT32 (I would have to check the manual to see if NTFS/ext3 etc are supported).
Hope this helps someone!
Oaf
