[Roymus]

Hello all: I just picked up a CPO 2019 X3M40i. It’s my first BMW and so far, it’s not hyperbole to say I’ve fallen in love with this sleek beast. I’m coming from a Nissan Rogue SV which is like a sewing machine on wheels by comparison.

I’m a techie by trade and I like my tech to work the way I want it. One of the features I love about the new generation of OEM XM radios is the TuneStart feature, which I first encountered on the Nissan. For those of you not familiar, this is the feature of the XM radio where it will automatically cache a few minutes of your preprogrammed XM favorite stations, so when you tune to a favorite station, it will automatically start at the beginning of the song. It’s great for catching an oldie but goodie, and even better on road trips if you like listening to comedy stations…that way you catch the whole bit. The caching happens in the background so you don’t have to do anything…at least with the Nissan I didn’t. With the BMW tech, it’s a bit trickier (like most things I’m finding, but I like a challenge):

First, you must set up each of the XM stations you want to “Tunestart” as Smart Favorites. It took me a couple of days to realize that BMW really has 3 different types of favorites: a Preset, an actual Favorite, and a Smart Favorite (really there’s 4 types, if you count the memory buttons on the dash as favorites. To configure an XM station to use TuneStart, you must highlight it with the controller knob,, then press the Option button next to the iDrive controller in the center stack. This will display a series of options on the main display, one of which is Smart Favorite. If you make the station a Smart Favorite, when you tune to the station it will automatically start the current song at the beginning (i.e. TuneStart). It usually works flawlessly, although if the song is almost finished in real time, you may not get it to start at the beginning…YMMV. BTW, when I was initially setting up my radio favorites I absolutely scoured these forums looking for TuneStart instructions, and found only a single post mentioning the Option button and Smart Favorites…it may be in the manual, but buried deep it is!

This brings me to my question: apparently you are allowed to have only 6 Smart Favorites! This seems like a paltry number, and doesn’t jive with the number of Presets you can have (20-30) and regular Favorites (appears to be unlimited, but I may be wrong). Am I missing something here (for example, is there another way to get TuneStart configured to monitor stations that are not Smart Favorites)? If not, I’d love to suggest that BMW increase the number of allowable Smart Favorites in a future release…I’m sure there are many of us who love TuneStart, and there’s really no reason to not allow it for virtually all of your music channels (cache memory permitting). Thanks all…

[gfisher99]

I will be interested to see how many people still pay for XM when there are so many other options out there like Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, etc. I wish I could opt out of all the letters they send me to try to get me to subscribe. It is good for live sports, though. I give it that.

Hopefully someone has XM and can answer your question. Sounds like a cool feature I've never heard of.

[thestimp]

Nice try XM salesman, but we all use spotify and Tidal...

[gfisher99]

Originally Posted by thestimp

Nice try XM salesman, but we all use spotify and Tidal...

[Lifted]

TLDR: Honestly I made it through half of that, but I am one of the ones, apparently in the minority, that actually pays for Sirius/XM. I don't care enough to try to set up a feature like what you're talking about, though I guess it is kind of cool from a capability standpoint. I really only care about what's live so not much help here

[Cletus]

Roymus,

I suspect the limitation is largely due to bandwidth constraints over a single receiver. I'm sure this could be increased by adding multiple receivers in a single unit but this would in turn drive up the cost.

[ZCPM4]

I really wish XM was better since it's so convenient. In my experience, they seem to play 1 good song for every 4-5 bad songs; just as you notice the playlist is annoying, they play a song you like. It's like their goal is to string you along just enough so you don't change to something else.

[Roymus]

Thanks all...not an XM salesman, just an enthusiast also sorry about the length of the OP, I tend to ramble. My Nissan supported TuneStart on all the presets, that's the only reason I was asking about the BMW Smart Favorites. I take a lot of road trips and enjoy the XM comedy channels to pass the time...TuneStart is a great feature for those, especially when flipping back and forth between channels so you don't miss bits. First world problems