PCM Max USB Storage Capacity?

[evanevery]

Burmester is more than a speaker upgrade. Amplifiers are obviously different since they have different power ratings. The processors at least have different software since they have different DSP modes. It’s unknown whether they use different DACs but they certainly could’ve.

Its likely the DAC is built into the Burmester Amp itself. I don't know why it would be done any differently. It could be of course, but that would be a pretty sad implementation...

I expect the PCM just indexes (and selects) the contents of the USB storage device and then streams the actual file/data to the DAC for processing

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[louv]

I smell an Apple user! ;-)
...

As a two-time Apple Employee, yes, I'm an Apple User. (but I also worked for Microsoft and Dell... so I've been indoctrinated into both cults.).

 

[evanevery]

As a two-time Apple Employee, yes, I'm an Apple User. (but I also worked for Microsoft and Dell... so I've been indoctrinated into both cults.).

Wow, wake up screaming in the middle of the night much?

Microsoft (and HP) has licensed some of my software for their internal use but I've never courted Apple...

 

[evanevery]

Picked up the car about 6 hours ago. Just tested the 256 GB USB Thumb Drive I listed above. 256GB storage, NTFS filesystem, 7500 tracks, 160GB of music (FLAC). No noticable indexing delay problem.

Obviously need to test some more but gotta go now! The road awaits!

 

[evanevery]

Reporting back...

As @louv said, the PCM will drop from playing USB and transition to FM on startup. I haven't tried it with less music (3000 as suggested) but I can see where this would be annoying. It appeared to index all 7500 of my tracks quite quickly when I first tested this, but after shutting down the car it completely loses its place.

Even more frustrating, not only does it fail back to FM, it also completely forgets where you were in your library when it does this. So when you go back to USB, you have to dig back down in the library to get back where you were.

This is pretty shabby programming. Here's hoping we get it fixed via an OTA update at some point. (Maybe they could hire the guy at BMW who has this already figured out...)

So it looks like I'm going to have to keep TWO USB Thumb Drives in the car. One with less tracks (favorites) and another with my whole library if I need to dig for something...

 

[evanevery]

So, confirmed:

1. The USB ports WILL work with Thumb Drivers larger than 128 GB. I currently have a 256 GB drive plugged in and its reading and indexing the contents without issue (other than a restart timeout - see below). I will be trying a much larger drive very soon (1500 GB) just to see if I can find any size limit.

2. The PCM has a very annoying problem where it will NOT resume playing from USB storage after a vehicle restart if there are a lot of files (tracks) on the storage device. (The system fails over to FM radio and completely forgets where it was when it was last playing from USB). It doesn't seem to have anything to do with the size of the storage device but rather the number of files/tracks on it. @louv first identified this problem (Thanks! I think...) and suggested trying a smaller number of tracks. I had 7500 and am working to make a smaller collection with around 3000 as he suggested. This is a pretty boneheaded fail on the part of the Porsche engineers so now we must work around this stupid problem.

I am also off to find out why the PCM WiFi Hotspot in my car is not being broadcast at all and can not even be connected via manual (or QR) input... (I have started a dedicated thread on this as there also seems to be a lot of WiFi related problems with this vehicle...)

Whoever is in charge of the PCM development for this vehicle needs to be called on the carpet for these types of issues. I didn't expect this type of crap in a "Porsche". But this is my FIRST Porsche so maybe I need to adjust my expectations. This makes me sad.

 

[grahamsimmonds]

I am pleased the Burmester will play back music files from a USB stick. I will be interested to see how high we can go with the bit rate. I currently own a Tesla Model S and the premium system in that can only handle CD quality 44.1 khz 16 bit WAV files. Any higher and it errors. I have a studio at home and the music I produce is recorded at 48 khz 24 bit. This will not play in the Tesla but I hope it will in the Taycan with the Burmester. I will have to wait until November to find out unless someone has tried already?

 

[evanevery]

I am pleased the Burmester will play back music files from a USB stick. I will be interested to see how high we can go with the bit rate. I currently own a Tesla Model S and the premium system in that can only handle CD quality 44.1 khz 16 bit WAV files. Any higher and it errors. I have a studio at home and the music I produce is recorded at 48 khz 24 bit. This will not play in the Tesla but I hope it will in the Taycan with the Burmester. I will have to wait until November to find out unless someone has tried already?

I have plenty of CD Quality Audio ripped to FLAC and it plays it quite well and the Burmester sounds GREAT! The quietness of this car, with the sound quality of the Burmester, and using a high qulity source really pay off.

I have asked Burmester what kind of DAC they are using but still have not gotten a reply. Although the sound quality is exceptional, I don't think there is any way to determine what the actual DAC resolution is in real time for a particular source. You can certainly feed it HiRes audio files, but we have no way of knowing what the DAC is doing with them. Unlike a DragonFly DAC, there is no external indication of the conversion rate. And you can't feed your own DAC into the Burmester system as it has no analog audio inputs...

Rumor is it that the Burmester app (iPhone only) supports Tidal, but again, we have no way to know whats happening to the streams as they get processed. IOW: Although you might be able to play a HiRes MQA track, we have no idea if its being downrated or not. (Similar to playing an MQA track on the IPhone which also does not give you the full resolution either - without an external DAC).

 

[evanevery]

Update: I've now got two USB sticks in the car. Both 256GB. One has about 7500 tracks on it the other only 3200 (a subset).

@louv mentioned a while back that he was able to mitigate the "USB Index timeout" issue by reducing the number of files to around 3000. I can confirm that this has also worked for me with around 3200.

But I also noticed something else...

While I normally have been driving around with my 3200 file drive installed, I did put the larger (7500 files) drive in the other day as I wanted to hear something on that stick played through the Burmester. Moody Blues - Days of Future Passed was not in my reduced collection so I swapped drives and listened to it (amazing). Anyway, I left the 7500 file stick in the USB port....

I got in the car this morning, and noted that I had apparently paused the last track I was listening to BEFORE I shut the car down. When I started the car up (with the "big" stick) it did NOT timeout and fail over to FM radio as my music was paused. I just reached over and hit play. Not sure how long it was after I started up the car, but apparently long enough for the PCM to reindex or confirm the USB contents.

So maybe, if you want to keep a large collection of music installed in the USB port, just pause whatever you are playing before you shut the car down. This appears to help mitigate the timeout issue... (Otherwise you could have a lot of swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe, swiping in your future...)

(The timeout is especially frustrating as the PCM loses the place where you were listening and the poor user ergonomics of the PCM means you gotta swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe, etc to find what you were listening to. The artists with names beginning with "A" are certainly getting more play time than those at the end of the alphabet in my Taycan. I'm hearing a lot more ABBA than ZZ Top... ;-)

Here's also hoping that Porsche improves the software in some future update so this problem is taken care of completely...

BTW: I also have a 2TB (2000 GB) USB Drive (NVME to USB) which I have put my music on. The car is in the shop for the next two days getting the Windows tinted (30%) and PPF (Front Clip). I'll see if the PCM chokes on it or not when I get the car back...

 

[Vim Schrotnock]

FYI - I plugged in a 1TB USB into a Taycan at the dealer and it worked fine. Now, it only had a couple FLAC files on it.

 

[evanevery]

FYI,

2000 GB (2TB!) NTFS File System on a USB-C Storage Device (NVME to USB adapter). 7500 FLAC files...

The PCM had no issues reading or playing files from it...

There effectively doesn't appear to be a limit to the size of the USB storage device.

 

[503dav]

Has anyone played around with using partitions on a thumb drive? My hypothesis is if it supports up to 4 partitions, maybe it will only try to index the partition you're trying to access, and if each partition is holding <3200 tracks, maybe I can avoid having to store files on multiple USB drives (e.g. 3 x 85gb partitions on a single 256gb stick)?

 

[evanevery]

Has anyone played around with using partitions on a thumb drive? My hypothesis is if it supports up to 4 partitions, maybe it will only try to index the partition you're trying to access, and if each partition is holding <3200 tracks, maybe I can avoid having to store files on multiple USB drives (e.g. 3 x 85gb partitions on a single 256gb stick)?

Not sure if multiple partitions are even supported. (How would you switch between them?)

In any case, it will have to access/index whatever it finds. If you are using multiple partitions, you might as well use multiple Thumb Drives. This is exactly what I am doing... I have one "big" drive which has ALL my music on it, and another smaller one which has my "favorite" stuff.

This is not a filesystem (partition) thing its an indexing thing. ...and I expect its not even the number of files listed in the filesystem. Its that the software has to open up and read every single file to pull out the metadata for indexing (track title, artist name, album name, category, album art). The index is built on data INSIDE each file, not strictly on its filename and folder.

The problem here is the software used to index the USB Storage contents. Unlike other vehicles (i.e. BMW), it does not seem to have a very robust method of maintaining the index past a vehicle shutdown, or even remembering where it left off. This needs to be fixed/addressed in software.

 

[Vim Schrotnock]

Not sure if multiple partitions are even supported. (How would you switch between them?)

In any case, it will have to access/index whatever it finds. If you are using multiple partitions, you might as well use multiple Thumb Drives. This is exactly what I am doing... I have one "big" drive which has ALL my music on it, and another smaller one which has my "favorite" stuff.

This is not a filesystem (partition) thing its an indexing thing. ...and I expect its not even the number of files listed in the filesystem. Its that the software has to open up and read every single file to pull out the metadata for indexing (track title, artist name, album name, category, album art). The index is built on data INSIDE each file, not strictly on its filename and folder.

The problem here is the software used to index the USB Storage contents. Unlike other vehicles (i.e. BMW), it does not seem to have a very robust method of maintaining the index past a vehicle shutdown, or even remembering where it left off. This needs to be fixed/addressed in software.

Ok, so what I'm hearing is it doesn't allow you to 'group' your tracks into folders, then access each folder independently on the drive? That would be a shame. I was counting on putting everything on my 1TB drive, with folders for classical, jazz, rock etc. If it can't do this, they should definitely correct it. I mean, it's not rocket science...

 

[evanevery]

Ok, so what I'm hearing is it doesn't allow you to 'group' your tracks into folders, then access each folder independently on the drive? That would be a shame. I was counting on putting everything on my 1TB drive, with folders for classical, jazz, rock etc. If it can't do this, they should definitely correct it. I mean, it's not rocket science...

It does. You can view by folder and track -OR- use the indexed information as well (Album, Artist, etc). They are two completely independent sources of data. The embedded metadata in each track contains much more information and does not assume/require the user to properly sort or organize their tracks by folder names.

You could actually have all your tracks in a single folder and it would still index the metadata according to artist, album, track name, music type, etc (assuming all your tracks had the required metadata embedded in them).

If all your tracks have their music types properly embedded ("Classical", "Rock", etc) in their metadata tags, then it really doesn't matter how you put them in folders. (I just use "\Artist\Album\Track.flac" to make it easier for ME to manage the contents of the drive). I use dbPowerAmp to rip my music and then their companion app PerfectTunes to adjust metadata and album art if (very rarely) needed... (dbPowerAmp will query several internet sources of album info to automatically set the metadata when you rip the files. It seldom gets any of this wrong or requires any updates to the metadata. It will also run a CRC checksum on each track to see how your rip compared to other folks and it will let you know if it thinks it encountered an error.)

The problem is they are not storing the indexed information past the vehicle shutdown. (There are several ways they could confirm the USB drive had not been swapped or modified after the shutdown). As a minimum, at least they could store the last track being played so it could be resumed while the system re-indexed everything.

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