Results of tests on various audio formats - FLAC, ALAC, MP3, AAC
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2022 AMG SL63, 992 GT3, Taycan Turbo, 1966 Shelby Cobra, Ford Raptor, KTM 1290 Super Duke R Evo
Results of tests on various audio formats - FLAC, ALAC, MP3, AAC
I posted this in the AMG W213 forum. But, given the number of threads on the subject of audio formats, I thought it might be helpful to share on the broader W213 forum:
The results here apply to my 2020 E63S with high-end Burmester option, but are likely to apply to other W213 cars, especially recent ones.
The car will not read FLAC or MP4 tags. The symptom is that most of the files on your USB drive or SD card will show as "Unknown". You can still browse music by folder, and the files will play in the correct order, if they use the common convention of naming each track file with a 2-digit (or more) number, e.g. "01 - Breathe", "02 - On the run", etc, or even, for a multi-disc album, "1-01 track 1", "1-02 track 2", etc. That way track 10 will play after track 09, disc 2 will play after disc 1, and you won't have the problem of playing the tracks in alphabetical order of track name. But browsing by folder isn't always convenient unless you organize your folders in the way you want to browse them.
If you ripped CDs or bought online music, if it's in FLAC, ALAC or AAC format, your files are likely using FLAC or MP4 tags and the car doesn't see them. If you used EAC to rip your CDs and used the default tagging, you may have ID3 (actually ID3v2) tags in your FLAC files by accident. That causes problems with some FLAC players, but may actually help with COMAND.
Files using ID3 tags, generally ID3v2.3 or ID3v2,4 these days, are recognized correctly by the car and everything works: album art, search by Artist, Album, Title, play order, etc. You may find it cleaner to use the Album Artist data in the Artist tags -- it's easy to copy them over in, say, MP3tag or, even better, Jaikoz. That way, when you search by Artist, you won't get all the guest artists on some albums, unless that's what you want.
Unfortunately, you're likely stuck with 320kbps MP3 as the best format you can use if you want the car to recognize your files and their metadata. It's generally hard to tell the difference between 320kbps MP3 and higher-resolution lossless formats, especially in a moving car, although the Burmester high-end system is unusually resolving. But it bothers some people, me included. The other option that I found to work was to use an MTP-compatible portable player plugged into a USB port. I used an Astell&Kern AK240 set to MTP mode. The car indexed all the FLAC files correctly and everything works fine.
I didn't try, but expect than an iPod would also work, and 256GB iPods are readily available. You'd have to convert any FLACs to ALACs, but there's plenty of free software that does that; I use MediaHuman Audio Converter, because it uses all 64 cores on my PC and takes only a few minutes to convert thousands of files.
I haven't addressed album art here and it's possible that Mercedes imposes limits on size. Given the resolution of the COMAND screen, there's no point in having high-resolution art. It's easy to downsize all the art in your files using dBPowerAmp's batch converter. I just set them all to 400x400 pixels.
I suggest that you create a separate folder on your PC/Mac to house the music files that you want to use in your car. That way you can do things to the files to make them specifically more car-friendly, without affecting your main music collection.
I hope that is is helpful! I've been through this process with other cars and they're all different, even within brands. I guess it proves that the beauty of standards is there are so many of them :-).
The results here apply to my 2020 E63S with high-end Burmester option, but are likely to apply to other W213 cars, especially recent ones.
The car will not read FLAC or MP4 tags. The symptom is that most of the files on your USB drive or SD card will show as "Unknown". You can still browse music by folder, and the files will play in the correct order, if they use the common convention of naming each track file with a 2-digit (or more) number, e.g. "01 - Breathe", "02 - On the run", etc, or even, for a multi-disc album, "1-01 track 1", "1-02 track 2", etc. That way track 10 will play after track 09, disc 2 will play after disc 1, and you won't have the problem of playing the tracks in alphabetical order of track name. But browsing by folder isn't always convenient unless you organize your folders in the way you want to browse them.
If you ripped CDs or bought online music, if it's in FLAC, ALAC or AAC format, your files are likely using FLAC or MP4 tags and the car doesn't see them. If you used EAC to rip your CDs and used the default tagging, you may have ID3 (actually ID3v2) tags in your FLAC files by accident. That causes problems with some FLAC players, but may actually help with COMAND.
Files using ID3 tags, generally ID3v2.3 or ID3v2,4 these days, are recognized correctly by the car and everything works: album art, search by Artist, Album, Title, play order, etc. You may find it cleaner to use the Album Artist data in the Artist tags -- it's easy to copy them over in, say, MP3tag or, even better, Jaikoz. That way, when you search by Artist, you won't get all the guest artists on some albums, unless that's what you want.
Unfortunately, you're likely stuck with 320kbps MP3 as the best format you can use if you want the car to recognize your files and their metadata. It's generally hard to tell the difference between 320kbps MP3 and higher-resolution lossless formats, especially in a moving car, although the Burmester high-end system is unusually resolving. But it bothers some people, me included. The other option that I found to work was to use an MTP-compatible portable player plugged into a USB port. I used an Astell&Kern AK240 set to MTP mode. The car indexed all the FLAC files correctly and everything works fine.
I didn't try, but expect than an iPod would also work, and 256GB iPods are readily available. You'd have to convert any FLACs to ALACs, but there's plenty of free software that does that; I use MediaHuman Audio Converter, because it uses all 64 cores on my PC and takes only a few minutes to convert thousands of files.
I haven't addressed album art here and it's possible that Mercedes imposes limits on size. Given the resolution of the COMAND screen, there's no point in having high-resolution art. It's easy to downsize all the art in your files using dBPowerAmp's batch converter. I just set them all to 400x400 pixels.
I suggest that you create a separate folder on your PC/Mac to house the music files that you want to use in your car. That way you can do things to the files to make them specifically more car-friendly, without affecting your main music collection.
I hope that is is helpful! I've been through this process with other cars and they're all different, even within brands. I guess it proves that the beauty of standards is there are so many of them :-).
