At least one way to randomize all USB MP3 songs on a non iDrive Professional Radio

[GRM Scott]

Hey all, I had a long drive from where I bought my E90 to my house, and plenty of time to learn about the radio. I have a 32GB memory stick that's nearly full of music--lots of songs--and I like truly random tunes for long trips.

Most of the organization methods the Professional radio gives you are based on Directory, or Artist, things like that, but then the RANDOM button will only give you selections within that directory or artist or whatever.

I noticed that one of the sorting options was "GENRE" and browsing through it looks like this category pulls the ID3 tag info from the MP3s. I never did anything with these tags before, so I figured it wouldn't hurt anything to change 'em all to some uniform tag. I used a random freeware MP3 tag editing program, but have since learned that you can just highlight a bunch of MP3s in a folder, right click (using Windows 10 anyway) and go to Properties > Details. Highlight the GENRE field, type in whatever you want (I chose "BMW" for all the songs I wanted to be able to access randomly) and it will change the ID3 data for every song to whatever you input.

This took a long while for the many thousands of songs on this memory stick, but sure enough, I can now pull up the GENRE "BMW," click the little "+" icon a few times to get to the actual list of songs (and there are a LOT of them), start playing one and then check the RANDOM box. Now it'll jump all over like a schizophrenic toad on a skillet.

[GRM Scott]

Actually, it looks like you can random all if you just keep digging into the "All+" folder on any greater category you choose, so my approach was overkill. That said, the ID3 tags are proving a fine way to create large playlists for myself and my daughter.