I am well chuffed with the MDI in this car.

I had been using my walkman, but, after reading a post about using a hard drive I thought I would have a go.

I bought a 250gb hard drive from Maplin for £35, and copied my music collection to it.

Its now permanently plugged in the car and I now have my entire 110gb music collection at my fingertips available in the car which I can browse through and select, with track/artist/album/folder ID information displayed on the Swing stereo.

When the ignition key is removed the drive switches off. When you next switch on the music resumes from the same point it left off.

The drive fits well in the compartment next to the MDI socket and is an inconspicuous black box. As a bonus it has 2 leds the same colour as the instrumentation! Luvly.

I am well chuffed with the MDI in this car.

I had been using my walkman, but, after reading a post about using a hard drive I thought I would have a go.

I bought a 250gb hard drive from Maplin for £35, and copied my music collection to it.

Its now permanently plugged in the car and I now have my entire 110gb music collection at my fingertips available in the car which I can browse through and select, with track/artist/album/folder ID information displayed on the Swing stereo.

When the ignition key is removed the drive switches off. When you next switch on the music resumes from the same point it left off.

The drive fits well in the compartment next to the MDI socket and is an inconspicuous black box. As a bonus it has 2 leds the same colour as the instrumentation! Luvly.

What a brilliant discovery Latte - nice one - I was contemplating using a memory stick when my vRS arrives (whenever that is!), but the idea of using a big hard drive with uncompressed CD's on is just blue sky thinking! How easy is it to navigate from one album to another using the remote steering controls?

Cheers Andy

Hi,

Was the hard drive the Freeagent GoFlex as it 's on special offer at the moment?

Ah, well, sadly its limited from the wheel.

You have the 2 buttons for up/down which are skip/scan in either direction.

So you are only stepping through tracks from here. All the real folder navigation is from the head unit.

Therefore the key is good folder management from the outset when you burn the data, you could have as many principal folders as there were users of the system. E.G. Gilbert/Juliet/Wilbur/Shared?

The MDI will read MP3, WMA, AAC and OGG Vorbis files. You need to format the HDD in FAT32, it wont work straight out of the box.

And Hi Don, yes it is a Freeagent Goflex I am using.

It sounds like I might need to try this. I pick up my Fabia estate on Saturday and have specified the MDI option. I was going to try my Creative Zen Vision M but that's running out of space.

Does the MDI connector come with any cables or will I need to buy these seperately? It looks like they're £20 from Skoda.

Latte: What are the access speeds like? This was one of the things I was worried about. I only have ~30GB of music so if yours runs well with almost 4 times that then I should be fine!

jj

Hi JJ, the MDI is standard fit in the VRS and should come with a lead as it says this somewhere in the brochure.

Not sure about whether it states this if you are getting it as an option.

I missed the freebie connection lead as I didnt spot this in the brochure until I had bought them.

When I found that the leads were £20 a pop (more for Iphone) and the dealer had to order them, I bought them from ebay for £3.99 and £6.99. Remember MDI is VAG so Seat/VW MDI leads are the same as Skodas.

Early days with the HDD but I have found no access time delays so far. It remains to be seen how it will cope with extremes of temperature.

Please be aware you need to be able to format the drive to FAT32 so MDI can read it. Other formats just bring up "PD not supported" error messages on the stereo. I have both XP and Vista operating systems and neither could do this. I had to download some (free) software to achieve FAT32 formatting.

Hi JJ, the MDI is standard fit in the VRS and should come with a lead as it says this somewhere in the brochure.

Not sure about whether it states this if you are getting it as an option.

I missed the freebie connection lead as I didnt spot this in the brochure until I had bought them.

When I found that the leads were £20 a pop (more for Iphone) and the dealer had to order them, I bought them from ebay for £3.99 and £6.99. Remember MDI is VAG so Seat/VW MDI leads are the same as Skodas.

Early days with the HDD but I have found no access time delays so far. It remains to be seen how it will cope with extremes of temperature.

Please be aware you need to be able to format the drive to FAT32 so MDI can read it. Other formats just bring up "PD not supported" error messages on the stereo. I have both XP and Vista operating systems and neither could do this. I had to download some (free) software to achieve FAT32 formatting.

Thanks for the info Latte.

I've had a look on ebay for a cable but can't seem to find any for much less than £20. I was searching for "mdi usb cable". Is it called something else? Any chance you could let me know the name of the ebayer selling them?

Cheers.

anyone know if its possible to add the mdi after the cxars been built, ie yourself or with the help of a dealer? and at what price?

Ben

Thanks for the info Latte.

I've had a look on ebay for a cable but can't seem to find any for much less than £20. I was searching for "mdi usb cable". Is it called something else? Any chance you could let me know the name of the ebayer selling them?

Cheers.

A lot are listed as VW items. A few item numbers from ebay;

190443703986 £1.99!

290474924293

170541061680 I bought from this person.

Happy hunting.

Latte, you're a star. "Media in" was the search term I should have been using!

Latte, sounds interesting - just ordered a new Fabia SE, and added the MDI hoping this might be possible - the dealer thought no, MDI was ipod only, but that it would be a pig to try and retrofit (and VW kit on ebay was more than the option) so went ahead. Presume you are using the USB lead and a standard USB hard disk? Have you tried a plain old USB stick?

Alan

Formatting a hard drive or memory stick as FAT32 is very easy on an Apple Macintosh. Simply follow the following process:

1. launch the application Disk Utility (found in the Utilities folder which can be quickly opened from the Go menu in the Finder).

2. Connect the drive you want to format,

3. Select it in the list of connected drives on the left

4. Click on the tab Erase

5. Choose MS-DOS (FAT) in the popup menu and give the drive a name

6. Click on Erase... and confirm that you want to erase the drive in the dialog that appears.

That's it - a few seconds later the drive will be formatted in FAT32.

Obviously make absolutely sure that you format the right drive!

Formatting a hard drive or memory stick as FAT32 is very easy on an Apple Macintosh. Simply follow the following process:

1. launch the application Disk Utility (found in the Utilities folder which can be quickly opened from the Go menu in the Finder).

2. Connect the drive you want to format,

3. Select it in the list of connected drives on the left

4. Click on the tab Erase

5. Choose MS-DOS (FAT) in the popup menu and give the drive a name

6. Click on Erase... and confirm that you want to erase the drive in the dialog that appears.

That's it - a few seconds later the drive will be formatted in FAT32.

Obviously make absolutely sure that you format the right drive!

I have a mac. Is it possible to back up my itunes tracks onto an external drive and then connect the drive using the MDI USB cable?

Cheers

I have a mac. Is it possible to back up my itunes tracks onto an external drive and then connect the drive using the MDI USB cable?

Yes, this should be very straightforward. The simplest way is to create a playlist in iTunes, drag all the tracks you want into it, then select all the tracks in the playlist (use CMD-A or Select All from the Edit menu) and drag them to the icon of the hard disk in one go. Once on the hard disk you can organise them in folders to suit your requirements. Note that if you have a lot of tracks this will be somewhat problematic as the tracks are only named for the tile of the song, not for the artist or album. I don't know what the capabilities of the radio are for displaying the tracks by artist or album if they aren't pre-sorted into folders.

Alternatively you can copy them over one album at a time by first making a new folder on the USB drive, give it the name you want for it, then selecting the tracks of the album in iTunes and again drag them across to the hard disk, dropping them into the new folder you have created.

Another way of doing this is to open the iTunes Music folder on your hard disk (which is stored in the Music folder in your Home directory) and navigate through until you find the folder(s) you want, them just drag these directly to the USB drive.

Any of these ways will lead to a similar result; choosing between them is simply on the basis of how many tracks you want to transfer and how you want them to be organised on the new drive.

Note that this may work similarly on Windows - however I have not tested whether you can drag files directly from iTunes on Windows to a drive shown in Windows Explorer. Note also that it IS possible to format a drive (of up to 1TB) with FAT32 under Windows but it has to be done from the command prompt using the Format command. There is also a free third-party utility called SwissKnife which provides a better user interface than the command prompt, although IMHO not anything like as straightforward as Disk Utility on the Mac. No real surprise there!

Edited 27 September, 201015 yr by nickcoll

Latte, sounds interesting - just ordered a new Fabia SE, and added the MDI hoping this might be possible - the dealer thought no, MDI was ipod only, but that it would be a pig to try and retrofit (and VW kit on ebay was more than the option) so went ahead. Presume you are using the USB lead and a standard USB hard disk? Have you tried a plain old USB stick?

Alan

Hi Alan, yep a usb stick works fine too.

Hi Alan, yep a usb stick works fine too.

Thanks Latte - now just got to wait for the car to be built!

Shouldn't be any problem transferring files from Windows, once your disk is formatted. I use itunes to convert CDs to MP3 and it saves the MP3 files in album folders within artist folders, so not hard at all to transfer to another disk in the normal windows explorer way.