1TB of music by connecting up a Seagate HD
 

I know this has been done before and Audi even sells HD's with the Audi brand, but I thought I would post up all the parts that I used for my fellow Q owners. For $65.98 all-in, I don't think you can beat it with a stick.

Parts:
- I saw that a Seagate expansion drive was on sale on Amazon, so I picked one up. "Seagate Expansion 1TB Portable External Hard Drive USB 3.0 (STBX1000101)" for $58.29.

- I tried cheaping out, and instead of buying the official Audi USB adapter, I bought a "VicTsing AMI MMI Music Cable." It cost $7.69 and it works perfectly. I went on Amazon to provide a link here and it looks like it is not available anymore from Amazon (I literally bought this 2 days ago so it must be popular). I would try ebay for it. It was sold by VicDirect.


Setup:
- format the drive to FAT32 using any of the free available utilities out there. I went to Download.com and pulled down the HP USB Disc Storage Format tool v2.2.3.
- put all of your tunes onto the drive. I used the following structure: \\Music\(artist)\(album)\(songs) but I don't think it matters.
- connect the drive to your MMI using the supplied cable and enjoy your music
- something I didn't see in my travels through the board (but is probably out there somewhere): an easy way to recreate iTunes playlists for use on the drive. iTunes playlists are very easy to recreate. What I did was create a folder on my desktop with the name of the playlist. Drag and drop the songs from the iTunes playlist (in iTunes) into the folder on the desktop. Move the folder to the expansion drive.

Issues:
- none so far. I haven't run into any song limits or incompatible mp3's. I tested a few albums at the beginning, middle and end of my collection and didn't have any playback problems.

The best part about all of this is that my album art is back. I was using a 160GB ipod classic which is not compatible with the red grommetted cable - so no album art. Now I have 280GB of music and album art.

Genius!

:D couldn't have been easier thanks to info I gathered on the board and some good old fashion luck with the cable and compatibility with the exact drive I bought. aside from the 8 hours it took to copy my music to the expansion drive, this was 15 minutes worth of work.

You can only browse this via m3u playlists or actual playlists, correct? No "smart browsing" like a connected iPod or the jukebox?

i am not sure what you mean by smart browsing. I navigate through the playlist like any folder that has mp3s in it.

Haven't picked up our car yet, but this had me wondering....

Any chance flac or AAC files are recognized, or is it just mp3s?

Dave

FLAC: Definitely not
AAC: I *think* so, but don't quote me on it... need to double check.

From Audi:
...two SDHC card reader (up to 32GB), both with MP3, WMA and AAC-compatible; dynamic station list.....

i am curious about FLAC too - looks like Jaxen is saying no. Jaxen, did you test that yourself?

i dont have any FLAC files due to size nor do i have any AAC files in my itunes. i started replacing them a few years ago with mp3s because i found myself using mp3gain a lot on my older songs, and mp3gain is only compatible with mp3 files.

Yes, I tested it.
FLAC files don't even show up in the MMI.