[blueman2]

A couple comments from my experience:

1) if you select USB1 on your iDrive and select options, there is an option to see how much space is left on the hard drive. Sure enough, there are 12G reserved for music use. That is all I will ever need.

2) If you use separate USB sticks to add music, then each time there will be another master folder created. USB1, USB2, USB3, etc. That is very inconvenient, IMHO. So, I just use the same 4G USB stick any time I add music. I fill it with music, copy it over to the iDrive, and then delete the music on the USB stick and add more, then copying it again to the iDrive. Doing this, everything keeps going into the same USB1 folder. Much neater.

3) I recommend at least 192 kbps encoding 256 is probably the optimal rate. Above 256, you will not hear any difference but you will waste disk space. Below 192, you will hear the difference.