8.0 Music Player Unusable

[iffatall]

I am totally frustrated too. Not only do you have to scroll through hundreds of pages, the scrolling is so laggy that I end up tapping one of the items before I even reach B! I have not seen such laggy scrolling in ten years.

The argument that everyone uses streaming services holds good if Tesla was offering most major streaming services. That is not the case. I use Google Music, and I do not see that coming to the UI any time soon. (Same for Apple Music).

Not everyone listens to the popular music that is mostly offered by the streaming services. Music popularity has an extremely heavy tail, and it is not easy for any service to serve all tracks to the end of the tail.

Also, what about when we are out of internet connectivity? It happens very often on road trips. Just like Google Maps cannot be used for navigation, streaming cannot be the only option for media.

 

[Todd Burch]

I have a USB drive with several thousand songs on it. Every time the car wakes up, it takes 8 MINUTES to scan the drive. This means I can't listen to my USB songs for 8 minutes after I get in the car.

Absolutely ridiculous. It's like nobody even tested the USB stuff with a decent sized music collection.

I have energy saving turned on in the car--haven't determined if that's the cause yet.

 

[iffatall]

In the screenshot they had in the release notes, they had 20 albums. So looks like they have tested for 20 album use cases. No scrolling needed.

 

[BEEZR]

I can't find a way to edit the order of the favorites, other than deleting them all and adding them in the order I want.

Yeah, that's pretty useless...

 

[sorka]

I have a USB drive with several thousand songs on it. Every time the car wakes up, it takes 8 MINUTES to scan the drive. This means I can't listen to my USB songs for 8 minutes after I get in the car.

Seriously? Has anyone else confirmed this? The figurative "unusable" appears to be changing to a *literal* "unusable"!!!!!

 

[Todd Burch]

Seriously? Has anyone else confirmed this? The figurative "unusable" appears to be changing to a *literal* "unusable"!!!!!

I now see mention of it in other threads complaining about the media player .

 

[BEEZR]

And why does the car not recognize my iPhone as a USB device? I'm sure many of us use our phones for music, yet the only way to playback from the phone is via Bluetooth. Sound quality is worse and you can't use the car's display to navigate the music library. Even if I turn off BT on the phone, by connecting via USB it doesn't recognize the phone as a USB device.

 

[rxlawdude]

Meanwhile, I'm dealing with a poster on the tesla.com forum that insists we are morons for complaining about the USB playing. He suggests finding the appropriate software on the owner's PC or Mac to modify tags so that the 8.0 player will do such niceties as playing an album in track order. Grrrr.

He ignores the fact that all music worked perfectly in 7.1 (yes, there were the other nits about the audio system that are now fixed, and I appreciate it) and every other device, but now fails in the 8.0 version of Tesla's firmware. I have a mixture of .MP3s and .FLAC files. Grrrr.

 

[sorka]

I now see mention of it in other threads complaining about the media player .

Many other threads. For me the real bug is having to say no to the install dialog every day...possibly forever and making sure the SC puts a no software install note in my file so they don't wipe out my ability to play music off the USB.

 

[Frank the Tank]

Anyone know how to reorder the FM radio stations? My stations are now all mixed up between LA and San Francisco radio stations and annoying to jump from station to station easily in the order I want to.

 

[AmpedRealtor]

This new UI is a complete mess. You don't even know what is informational and what is touchable. There are no visual indicators that something can be pressed. Piss poor job by Tesla.

 

[gordo]

This new UI is a complete mess. You don't even know what is informational and what is touchable.

Nevermind your silly 'usability' concerns. It's flat and non-skeuomorphic, so it's de facto better than whatever came before it. ;-)

 

[tinm]

Some comments I posted elsewhere on the Media Player UI that are relevant here:

Firmware 8.0 - For Classic Model S

 

[aesculus]

Can you be more specific? Most possible points of contact are equivalent to /dev/null (for all you *NIX geeks out there).

Or if you are really a raw programmer, NOP or NOOP

NOP - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[aesculus]

Nevermind your silly 'usability' concerns. It's flat and non-skeuomorphic, so it's de facto better than whatever came before it. ;-)

Thank you Jony Ivy.

 

[int32_t]

I have said before and I say again: Tesla's software team is a mess and I suspect Elon doesn't care.

I totally agree with you on the UI and MCU front. I disagree on the embedded front. It seems Tesla has rock solid battery and drive control, the best traction control in the industry, solid security between the main systems, etc. It's just the Linux UX people who seem a bit stretched thin and/or lacking solid goals at the moment. I sense somewhere new for Elon to bring his sleeping bag ...

 

[int32_t]

... Not everyone listens to the popular music that is mostly offered by the streaming services. Music popularity has an extremely heavy tail, and it is not easy for any service to serve all tracks to the end of the tail.

Also, what about when we are out of internet connectivity? It happens very often on road trips. Just like Google Maps cannot be used for navigation, streaming cannot be the only option for media.

I cannot like this enough! 'Zactly. If it absolutely 100% relies on live Internet connectivity to function, I distrust it, dislike it, or hate it. Streaming: when I try to stream anything (video, music, whatever) it never works flawlessly. There are hiccups at the very least, or worse, it stops and I have to manually start it again. If it works at all. Do I have that problem with local files? Not at all. I can listen to any part of my entire music collection anywhere ... for free ... no connections to nothin' required!
</rant>

Yeah, like I was saying ... can we stop optimising for always-online stream-cloud everything already?

 

[TexasEV]

Nevermind your silly 'usability' concerns. It's flat and non-skeuomorphic, so it's de facto better than whatever came before it. ;-)

I know you said that sarcastically, but even for those who believe that's true, it's only true for computers and phones but not cars. When driving and you take a fraction of a second glance at the screen, you're better off having a button icon or some skeumorphism to give a visual clue. At least I am. Also my 60 year old eyes really have a problem with the thin typeface and grey text on white background. I have to concentrate harder when looking at it, and that's not a good thing when driving. Between these UI changes and the emphasis on streaming music over USB (usually ripped from CD collections) it seems that Tesla is designing the firmware for a market that is younger than the average age of most Tesla owners I know.

 

[Chico]

Also, what about when we are out of internet connectivity? It happens very often on road trips.

Not just road trips. Most of the area surrounding my home and driving areas don't have connectivity.

I've always depended on a USB hard drive for my music in the Tesla.

Disaster. Wouldn't buy the car today with this.

 

[RogerHScott]

Tesla is designing the firmware for a market that is younger than the average age of most Tesla owners I know

Well, you can't really fault a company for "leading the target". But it is also possible they're going overboard in unifying the M3 with MS/MX. The 3 buyers are likely to be younger and hipper than us S/X codgers, while we will be older and have more insurance. Maybe
the UIs should be purposefully differentiated to better suit those differing demographics.