MMITunes: Create playlists for your Audi MMI/RNS-E on the Mac
Comments(42) I have an iPod Classic connected to the Audi Music Interface (AMI) in my car to listen to music over the Audi multimedia system MMI 3G. The iPod is able to store a vast collection of music but sometimes I just want to listen to the tracks I recently downloaded in the iTunes music store without having to walk down to the garage, disconnecting the iPod, sync it on my Mac and so on. I just want to drag ‘n drop a few dozen audio tracks from iTunes to an SD-card and insert the card into the MMI’s SD-card slot when I get to the car the next time.
Now, the problem is that there are no playlists on the SD-card and thus the tracks are played in the order the MMI finds them on the card. This is where MMITunes comes into play. MMITunes is a small tool that creates playlists for all audio tracks it finds on a SD-card. It even creates multiple playlists with different audio track sorting. One of the created playlists contains a random sort order. Actually, there’s a “mix” option in the MMI but it gets deactivated every now and then so having a randomized playlist might be a good thing. The following playlists are created by MMITunes:
- MMITunes_RND.m3u: Random sorting, as described above
- MMITunes_TRK_RND.m3u: Artists in alphabetical order but albums and tracks in random order
- MMITunes_SORTED.m3u: Artists, albums in alphabetical order, tracks in play order if track number is set in iTunes
Screenshot:
In case you’re using a folder structure on that SD-card to organize your music: MMITunes will take care of it and add playlist entries for audio tracks it finds in subfolders as well. I also added an option for Audi RNS-E users to delete all hidden files and directories on the SD-card. Unfortunately, the RNS-E displays hidden “.”-files as playable audio tracks.
The latest MMITunes release is available in the downloads area. It requires the latest and greatest version of Mac OS X. It’s untested with Mac OS X versions prior to 10.6.4. MMITunes is free of charge and not bound by any particular license. Install it by opening the .dmg and drag n’ drop the application icon to the application folder.
If MMITunes isn’t exactly what you need you may want to have a look at Export to Audi MMI, iTunes Export and Blue Harvest.
I have a 2012 Audi TT. I downloaded MMItunes. I dragged my music from itunes over to my SD card,opened MMItunes, clicked Go. When I place the card in my car, it says that there are no readable files. I previously tried putting the music in folders by artist. But, that didn’t work. So, I just dragged the songs over without folders. Still no readable files. Any suggestions? I’ve spent weeks on this and just found MMItunes. Was hoping this was the answer.
Thanks!
How did you format the SD card? Are you sure it’s FAT32?
Please make sure you do not enable the remove hidden files checkbox.
Cheers,
Jan
How do I format the card to FAT32. Or check the format? Thanks!
the card is formatted as FAT31. The MMItunes converts the songs into MP#s. But adds these annoying copies that arent’t readable. When I check the box, all of my music gets deleted.
My Audi has the RNS-E. My Mac creates ._ type of useless files, I selected the option to “Remove hidden files and directories”. It went ahead and removed my entire music folder. Is there away around these annoying useless files?
Also, is there a limit to the number of folders (artists names) I can have on the SD Card?
You could use the “Blue Harvest” tool mentioned in the blog post to get rid of the hidden files. When I owned a car with an RNS-E the limit was 400 songs but that was like 6 years ago so things might have changed.
Cheers,
Jan
Unfortunately, your app also wiped my hard disk… I checked “Remove hidden files and directories” and it removed everything from the USB drive. No big deal — I just copied everything over again, but I thought you’d like to know…
(Maybe you should disable this feature?)
P.S. Running Lion with a FAT 160gb USB drive.
Sorry for the inconvenience Andrew, the option is permanently disabled now.
Cheers,
Jan
Hi, to remove the ._ files use the terminal app and run the dot_clean command, so if I have an SD card called music1 you would run:
dot_clean -mv /volume/music1
This will remove the files and show you what it’s doing too.
Hope this helps.
Hi Jan,
Jeff asked for the same a year ago: do you have plans to add creating other playlists, like “genre”-playlists.
It would be VERY helpful to me… :-)
Because I´d like to have all my music with me on the 2x32GB-SD-cards and the music is on folders “A”-”Z” regarding the names of the artists. Changes in my music-collection will be considered by sync between MacBookPro and SD-card; but sometime I´d like to hear the music not by artist but by genre. The problem is to have actual playlists by genre on the SD-Card…
Best regards from Germany
Fred
Hi Jan, thanks a lot for doing this at your site… its so expensive to buy some interfaces to unlock vim and its a simple way to do it on vcds. Im trying to find some help to unlock vim on my Audi a1 2011. It seems its a 3g system. I didnt find the srial number in module 5f. And moduke 07 its not installed in the car. Can you help me unlock it? Thanks a lot,
Fred, I’m about to release a new version of MMITunes which is capable of auto-generating genre-based playlists. I don’t know if this is exactly what you’re looking for but at least for me this is quite a useful enhancement.
Cheers,
Jan
Hi Jan,
sounds GREAT!
My “idea”: take the field “genre” from the metadatas of the songs and create genre-playlists. Like “folk”, “jazz” or so.
And this should be done of the stick or hard-disk-drive itself.
Thanks in advance for your efforts!!
Best regards
Fred
New version: http://trick77.com/2011/10/15/.....playlists/
Hi Jan,
unfortunately MMItunes runs only 1 times succesfully. After that I changed all the songs to ID-Tag 2.4 but MMItunes runs over 8 hours without finishing…
Tried the old song-library again (a mix of ID-Tag2.3 and 2.4) but without success too.
Do you have any idea what I can do in addition?
Cheers
Fred
PS: Tried MMItunes 3.01 and an old version (2.x) on MacBookPro too; on SD-card as well as on hard-disc-drive; all without success :-(
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I use show hidden files” mac program – once enabled it will show “light blue” the hidden files delete spotlight and .fstevensd folders and eject the Sd card.
Ever time you pop the card in to the mac it will install these two folders.