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M2 Technical Topics > Navigation, iDrive, Audio, Video, Bluetooth, Phone, Cameras, Electronics > Force Wired Carplay?

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      12-13-2020, 10:02 AM   #1
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Force Wired Carplay?

Hoping the forum can help me with a dilemma. Did a quick search on here with no luck. Basically would like to force carplay to run through USB rather than wifi. Based on my understanding, this is not possible natively. Is there a coding option to make this possible?

And for those wondering, a few reasons I would like wired:

1. Audio quality: when I plug in and play music through iDrive, there is a significant improvement in audio quality vs carplay

2. M Laptimer +Gopro. I need to connect to carplay/ wifi to allow me to run my M laptimer in iDrive... this makes it so I can not connect to my GoPro's wifi to sync up the video. Quite the oversight and looks like BMW hasn't updated Laptimer on iOS for 3 years...

3. General instability: Works well 90-95% of the times, but sometimes has issues disconnecting from my home wifi and getting on carplay... when in congested areas with a lot of EMI (airports etc) the audio cuts in and out.

4. I plug in anyway to charge my phone because the wireless charging is out of place and overheats my phone
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      12-13-2020, 11:25 AM   #2
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All things considered, I would like this too because it would probably be far more stable however I don't think its possible.
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      12-14-2020, 12:20 PM   #3
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Consider it a blessing that we have wireless CarPlay. On a Macan I borrowed recently there was only wired CarPlay, and as soon as you plugged in the wire the GPS went totally haywire and it was no longer possible to use any mapping software from the iPhone for navigation. This happened on 3 different iPhone 11 and 12.
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      12-14-2020, 12:42 PM   #4
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Wireless CarPlay has the same audio quality as wired. They don't use compressed BT stack instead wireless CP uses wifi.

I agree with the gopro part though.what I don't like is the latency of audio with wireless CarPlay. Still a minor inconvenience over the overall usability
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      12-14-2020, 05:10 PM   #5
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Fabb View Post
Wireless CarPlay has the same audio quality as wired. They don't use compressed BT stack instead wireless CP uses wifi.

I agree with the gopro part though.what I don't like is the latency of audio with wireless CarPlay. Still a minor inconvenience over the overall usability
Is there really no compression done over wifi for carplay? I don't believe that, at least anecdotally through my experience. Plug in your phone and listen to music via usb natively on iDrive and tell me you don't hear a difference.
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      12-14-2020, 05:11 PM   #6
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Quote:
Originally Posted by bmxcamel View Post
Consider it a blessing that we have wireless CarPlay. On a Macan I borrowed recently there was only wired CarPlay, and as soon as you plugged in the wire the GPS went totally haywire and it was no longer possible to use any mapping software from the iPhone for navigation. This happened on 3 different iPhone 11 and 12.
That's unfortunate. Seems like a lot of manufacturers have issues perfectly integrating carplay in their systems. I also own a 16 GTI with wired carplay and that has worked flawlessly 99% of the time. Only had an issue when the usb cable was going out.
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      12-14-2020, 05:24 PM   #7
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Quote:
Originally Posted by filet.M2c View Post
Is there really no compression done over wifi for carplay? I don't believe that, at least anecdotally through my experience. Plug in your phone and listen to music via usb natively on iDrive and tell me you don't hear a difference.
Carplay does NOT have any compression whether it be wireless (through WiFi) or wired. It's just the way Carplay and iOS are designed to work. There isn't any audio compression.

Plugging in your iPhone and listening via usb would open up new factors since it isn't running on Carplay anymore and sounds like it would be using iDrive alone to play audio. Could be a number of factors that affect how the sound is converted. Possibly related to the car's onboard DAC rather than using the iPhone's DAC

Last edited by nioh_lbbm2; 12-14-2020 at 06:55 PM.. Reason: missing word
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      12-15-2020, 08:17 AM   #8
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Quote:
Originally Posted by nioh_lbbm2 View Post
Carplay does NOT have any compression whether it be wireless (through WiFi) or wired. It's just the way Carplay and iOS are designed to work. There isn't any audio compression.

Plugging in your iPhone and listening via usb would open up new factors since it isn't running on Carplay anymore and sounds like it would be using iDrive alone to play audio. Could be a number of factors that affect how the sound is converted. Possibly related to the car's onboard DAC rather than using the iPhone's DAC
After some research, it does appear carplay transmits 16bit/44.1 kHz regardless if it is wired or wireless. So my audio quality concern will not be addressedeither way. Still would like my other issues addressed though. So if anyone knows a way to enable wired, I'd appreciate it!
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      12-17-2020, 10:58 AM   #9
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I find wireless carplay a blessing and a curse. The general 'buggy-ness' bothers me. If wired CarPlay was more stable, I'd do that in a heartbeat.

In terms of audio quality, what others have posted is correct; wireless carplay should not have any degradation in sound quality. OP, check to make sure you're not streaming music over BT somehow. That would definitely have worse sound quality. The DAC in both the iPhone and the BMW headunit are crap, so there's that too.

One advantage of wireless carplay is that, for music, you could plug in a dedicated source (like a flash drive) into the center armrest, while still being connected to carplay.
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      12-17-2020, 02:21 PM   #10
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Quote:
Originally Posted by RocketBoots View Post
I find wireless carplay a blessing and a curse. The general 'buggy-ness' bothers me. If wired CarPlay was more stable, I'd do that in a heartbeat.

In terms of audio quality, what others have posted is correct; wireless carplay should not have any degradation in sound quality. OP, check to make sure you're not streaming music over BT somehow. That would definitely have worse sound quality. The DAC in both the iPhone and the BMW headunit are crap, so there's that too.

One advantage of wireless carplay is that, for music, you could plug in a dedicated source (like a flash drive) into the center armrest, while still being connected to carplay.
Yeah but similarly we have a hard drive that you could copy audio on from any USB device preventing the issue in the first place
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      12-17-2020, 03:04 PM   #11
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Quote:
Originally Posted by ASAP View Post
Yeah but similarly we have a hard drive that you could copy audio on from any USB device preventing the issue in the first place
True true; but if you run out of space on that HD, or want an easier mechanism to change your music library.
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      01-30-2021, 12:18 AM   #12
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Quote:
Originally Posted by filet.M2c View Post
Is there really no compression done over wifi for carplay? I don't believe that, at least anecdotally through my experience. Plug in your phone and listen to music via usb natively on iDrive and tell me you don't hear a difference.
That is correct. Similar to Airplay, it's lossless over an encrypted session so 10x better than BT.

"protocol stack uses UDP for streaming audio and is based on the RTSP network control protocol. The streams are transcoded using the Apple Lossless codec with 44100 Hz and 2 channels symmetrically encrypted with AES, requiring the receiver to have access to the appropriate key to decrypt the streams. The stream is buffered for approximately 2 seconds before playback begins,"
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