Welcome to Tesla Motors Club
Discuss Tesla's Model S, Model 3, Model X, Model Y, Cybertruck, Roadster and More.
Register

8.0 Music Player Unusable

This site may earn commission on affiliate links.
So far so good with 8.0 except the music player. I cannot imagine what they were thinking. I can only guess nobody ever tested this UI with anything but streaming media.

Like many owners, I have a USB stick in my car with several thousand songs on it. The old music player UI browsed these well -- the player certainly had annoying bugs, like unpausing every time the car woke up, but the player could be used to play music.

The new UI cannot be used to play music from this device. I mean, it is possible to play a single song, but that's about it. Why? Because the browsing has been totally broken.

1. If I browse by "Artist", I have to scroll down over 100 times to reach artists whose names start with "Z". Each scrolling operation (swipe) poses a risk that I'll accidentally click an artist name, and if I do that, when I go back to the artist list, my position has been lost -- it resets to the top and I have to start scrolling again!

2. When browsing by "Artist", once I pick an artist (probably one whose name starts with "A" -- see above) I am presented with a flat list of that artist's songs, not separated by album and not even in album order! I have not owned a music player with a bug like this since -- literally -- 2002.

3. Even if I give up and browse by "Folder" (lucky I organize my music into folders), even though I put the track number in every track name and properly tag my tracks with the track number, once I drill down to the folder for a given album the tracks don't play in order.

This is ridiculous. I came closer than I've ever come to a crash in my Model S just trying to swipe the 100+ times required to play a song by Yo La Tengo. Who releases software like this without testing? The music player has been effectively removed from my car by these idiotic changes -- I guess this is the downside of over-the-air updates, they can break stuff you would have never imagined they could break, and make stuff you rely on like playing music in your car basically impossible.

I wonder whether they'll ever fix this. They obviously don't care about it much or they would not have included this version of the player in the 8.0 release.
 
I made regular use of the right thumb wheel to switch media sources. So much so I rarely ever used (or displayed) the media app on the touch screen. With 8.0, it looks like that's gone and I have to clunkily look away and poke at a screen to switch from Slacker to Bluetooth. Especially annoying in my case since I run my touchscreen with Nav and rear camera at all times, so I have to swap around a bunch.

I haven't found a workaround, I'm presuming there isn't one.
 
Seems there are some bugs to work out... Shipped it too soon.

I haven't tried to play music from USB but I will check it out today. Other bugs I found in just the first hour of use:

1. Only shows my Streaming favorites. When I switch to AM or FM, I still see the Streaming favorites and not my AM/FM presets. Where did they go?
2. Pull into the garage, press mute/pause for the audio. Open the door and it unpauses/unmutes. Why does door open = unmute? And it doesn't do this everytime, sometimes it stays off. This should be an enable/disable feature.
 
  • Informative
Reactions: David29
So far so good with 8.0 except the music player. I cannot imagine what they were thinking. I can only guess nobody ever tested this UI with anything but streaming media.

Like many owners, I have a USB stick in my car with several thousand songs on it. The old music player UI browsed these well -- the player certainly had annoying bugs, like unpausing every time the car woke up, but the player could be used to play music.

The new UI cannot be used to play music from this device. I mean, it is possible to play a single song, but that's about it. Why? Because the browsing has been totally broken.

1. If I browse by "Artist", I have to scroll down over 100 times to reach artists whose names start with "Z". Each scrolling operation (swipe) poses a risk that I'll accidentally click an artist name, and if I do that, when I go back to the artist list, my position has been lost -- it resets to the top and I have to start scrolling again!

2. When browsing by "Artist", once I pick an artist (probably one whose name starts with "A" -- see above) I am presented with a flat list of that artist's songs, not separated by album and not even in album order! I have not owned a music player with a bug like this since -- literally -- 2002.

3. Even if I give up and browse by "Folder" (lucky I organize my music into folders), even though I put the track number in every track name and properly tag my tracks with the track number, once I drill down to the folder for a given album the tracks don't play in order.

This is ridiculous. I came closer than I've ever come to a crash in my Model S just trying to swipe the 100+ times required to play a song by Yo La Tengo. Who releases software like this without testing? The music player has been effectively removed from my car by these idiotic changes -- I guess this is the downside of over-the-air updates, they can break stuff you would have never imagined they could break, and make stuff you rely on like playing music in your car basically impossible.

I wonder whether they'll ever fix this. They obviously don't care about it much or they would not have included this version of the player in the 8.0 release.
Agreed. I use a 1TB hard drive with almost 8000 songs on it in FLAC format. Sounds great, but it will take me forever to scroll down to the T-Z songs.
 
I have said before and I say again: Tesla's software team is a mess and I suspect Elon doesn't care.
Not sure I entirely agree. The software team is working on exactly what they're being instructed to work on: Autopilot. Unfortunately this is coming at a detriment to all the other vehicle systems, and particularly frustrating for those of us without Autopilot and who would just like to have a functional interface to our music.

While I do think the new UI is very nice, it really pains me because I would have much rather time were spent on the missing features than revising the UI yet again.
 
  • Like
Reactions: jcadman22
is there a way to hide the "trending" and "podcast" sections from the TuneIn default display screen? I looked into my TuneIn online account as well and couldn't see anything.

Same question for Slacker...all these tiles/graphics are making me cross-eyed.

thx
 
Mine are mostly ripped from my extensive CD collection.

Mine too and I have a number of CDs that are worth hundreds each that have gone up in value tremendously and can't be streamed online from any legitimate sources and eve if I could, they'd sound like crap compared to eve 320 kbps mp3(lossless) which is what ever track I have is ripped at.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Drucifer
they'd sound like crap compared to eve 320 kbps mp3(lossless)
That in itself is an oxymoron. Why not just say 320kbps? Just because it's not discernible to the vast majority of people doesn't mean it's lossless.

First sentence from Wikipedia

MPEG-1 and/or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III,[4] more commonly referred to as MP3, is an audio coding format for digital audio which uses a form of lossy data compression.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Blastphemy
I made regular use of the right thumb wheel to switch media sources. So much so I rarely ever used (or displayed) the media app on the touch screen. With 8.0, it looks like that's gone and I have to clunkily look away and poke at a screen to switch from Slacker to Bluetooth. Especially annoying in my case since I run my touchscreen with Nav and rear camera at all times, so I have to swap around a bunch.

I haven't found a workaround, I'm presuming there isn't one.
I have had the same experience with the thumb wheel and media. I was going to start a thread, but I saw yours and decided to add to it. I routinely switch between XM and my iPhone for music and the thumbwheel was the safest way to do so. I would think that they will include it in one of the incremental updates (if enough folks complain about it).