Skip to content

Home

Jump to bottom
Chris Read edited this page Nov 24, 2020 · 2 revisions

This wiki outlines two aspects of the idrivetools collection.

  • Tool usage
  • The BMW Backup technical specification

What is idrivetools?

This is a collection of applications that can assist in managing music backups from various BMW iDrive music collections. When a backup is made by iDrive's music player the files it creates are protected by BMW's proprietary DRM. This means that if you open the backup on a computer, you will see music files but cannot play them like you would regular media files.

idrivetools will convert these files back into playable media files.

However, it will also take a collection of media files and convert them BACK into the DRM protected files so that they can be transferred back to your car.

Why would I want to do that?

The typical way that music is transferred to the car is through one or more transfers from USB drives. You have a collection of music files and you insert the USB into the car and iDrive imports the files for you. The collection grows over time, but things start to get a bit messy: duplicate music files, music with incorrect information and also music missing things like album covers.

This is where idrivetools comes in handy:

  1. Make a backup from your car to a USB drive
  2. Copy the files to your computer
  3. Run bmwunpack over the files to extract the actual media files
  4. Find and delete duplicate media files
  5. Use an ID3 editor to correct the music information (something like EasyTag, MP3Tag or MusicBrainz Picard)
  6. Add album covers using the same tag editing software
  7. Re-order folders if you want
  8. Add custom playlists
  9. Run bmwpack over the edited files to create an updated backup folder
  10. Copy the new backup folder onto a USB drive
  11. Plug the USB drive into your car and restore the new backup to the iDrive music player

What else can this do?

Along with the basic bmwpack and bmwunpack commands which deal with backups directly, there are two other commands.

bmwcreatenewbackup

This command creates a basic backup folder structure. It does not create the metadata files that are found in a regular backup. These are create later using the bmwpack command.

bmwconvert

This command takes a folder full of media files, in any structure, and converts it to a valid backup that can be restored back into a car.

Clone this wiki locally