8.0 USB shuffle is no longer random

[jcoverton]

I have 6000+ songs on USB which I play most of the time when driving. Because there is no support for playlists I first tried to create lists by genre and re tagged all my songs so I could fake playlists. This did not work as the Media player used Gracenote genre and not mine. As FLAC can have several types of tags I even changed the formats of the tags to see if any were used. No luck. My next solution was to use two USB drives and breakage music into two big playlists. Then I would select the USB drive and select songs and having shuffle selected I would get a random selection across all the music on one of the drives. This also solved the problem with phantom music playing when the car was charging. With shuffle on, the car never reached the end and get stuck on the last song in a selection.

Now with 8.0 two changes to this have wrecked this process. First the shuffle option turns off regularly so I have to keep, turning it back on. This I could fix by adding an extra step each time started playing music. The bigger issue is that now it plays the same songs in the same order each time. I have listened many times since 8.0 and I now can predict the next "random" song. I have even tried starting with different song but it still does not play different songs. I never noticed this before. Shuffle may not have been totally random but at least I got different music each time.

 

[jerry33]

I found that it didn't play all that randomly in 7 either. I'd hear the same songs for several days in a row if I didn't seed the day by starting on some random song. This is much harder to do in 8 because there's no alphabetic scroll bar. Tesla really needs someone who actually drives the car to vet these upgrades.

 

[Dithermaster]

OP is correct, I've experienced the same two bugs (random mode gets turned off, and random order repeats). I too predicted the songs just to prove I wasn't making it up. Both of these happen if you use streaming mode then go back to USB (the random order is sometimes different, but will do it eventually). I can't believe this made it through testing.

 

[TLej]

I fourth this observation.

 

[cschock]

Amen, sing it. I have noticed this too. It is absolutely a problem.

And as a once upon a time programmer, this is just unbelievable to me. Even if there is no true random number generator in the Model S Firmware, it shouldn't be very hard to use the microseconds since the year 2000 modulo the track count to get a pseudo random number key. I mean, I did this sort of thing as an undergrad IN FORTRAN 30+ years ago. How hard could it be?

 

[gsmith63]

Same here.

 

[RodF]

Still having the same issue. I hope that it is something that will eventually get addressed in future updates. But the first post on this problem was 9 months ago with no change.

 

[jerry33]

The have messed it up again. The recirc icon now just plays the same song over and over. This means that when you get to the last song it stops. You can't go back. The only fix is to remove the drive and start over (usually when it's very inconvenient to do so). They had this behaviour several releases ago, then it got fixed, and now it's broken again (along with the random stops and repeats which have been broken for a few releases now).

 

[bob_p]

The fact that this bug even got into a commercial release indicates Tesla's testing process is flawed.

Their internal testing should have caught this.

And, if it did get into beta testing - if Tesla has qualified beta testers (who know how to methodically test new software), they should have caught this.

This problem should require a major software change to fix - it could be as simple as ensuring the random number sequence they are using is really random (which is typically done by adding the current time in milleseconds to the random number, to simulate truly random numbers).

Other than quickly restoring the first letter scroll bar, it doesn't appear Tesla has fixed any of the media player problems introduced with the "improved" media player released last fall.

The XM radio is still almost unusable, because the media player won't display station information or the channel/category list - and Tesla removed the XM station sliders as part of the media player "improvements".

It's understandable Tesla has focused many resources on getting AP2 working - but, in the time we've been waiting for the media player bug fixes, Tesla was able to make other functionality improvements - such as "easter eggs"...

 

[Tdriver]

It is easy to create playlist.......Just create folders on the stick with the same name as the playlist on the computer .......then drag the songs from the playlist into the folders on the stick with the same name.

 

[AmpedRealtor]

At this point, it's quite clear that the team working on infotainment is composed of 8-year olds using BASIC.

 

[thecloud]

I don't think that's clear at all. Today's 8 year olds are probably using Rust.

Had a weird bug show up the other day. Was trying to play some saved Slacker stations, and they appeared to play (and showed correct cover art for the artists they claimed to be playing)... except every song was in French for some reason. After a couple of songs, it slowly dawned on us that these tracks were actually coming from an album on the USB stick by a French-language artist, and not being streamed. Nothing about the artist or album or track name would have coincided with what Slacker claimed to be playing, yet it decided it should pull tracks from USB instead of Slacker. (Not long after that, the CID went black and I had to reboot, and it hasn't happened since.)

 

[bob_p]

And, could they please fix the bug that turns the media player back on periodically after re-entering the car or ending a phone call? Especially if the audio volume has been increased - blasting the media player when it was supposed to be turned off is not very impressive when showing your car to friends or prospective Tesla customers...

 

[bob_p]

It appears the USB random shuffle problem may have been fixed in one of the recent releases.

Is anyone still seeing shuffle mode repeat the same 'random' sequence of songs?

 

[thecloud]

It appears the USB random shuffle problem may have been fixed in one of the recent releases.

Is anyone still seeing shuffle mode repeat the same 'random' sequence of songs?

I first noticed back in October that if you started playback by pressing the "Songs" item in the Recents list, then you got actual random sequences each time. However, if you started by manually choosing a specific song under the USB > Songs category, then sequences would reoccur. That was on the 2017.36 release.

Since then, I think a later release may have fixed it for the second case as well. Haven't noticed any repeated sequences for a while now.

 

[bob_p]

I did some testing yesterday, and could not get it to repeat. Looks like the problem was fixed.

Wouldn't it be nice if Tesla would actually document the bugs they fix in the releases...

 

[RodF]

Confirming as well, does not seem to repeat using either method.

 

[supratachophobia]

Had anyone noticed *how* it shuffles? It's kinda cool. If you play a song with a title that starts with the letter A, then the next song will be with an artist with the letter B or C, then the best song with be an album starting with D or E, and so on and so forth. So there is some sort of logic going on there that tries to keep it bouncing around. It seems to be working.

 

[thecloud]

Had anyone noticed *how* it shuffles? It's kinda cool. If you play a song with a title that starts with the letter A, then the next song will be with an artist with the letter B or C, then the best song with be an album starting with D or E, and so on and so forth. So there is some sort of logic going on there that tries to keep it bouncing around. It seems to be working.

Interesting. If that's really what it's doing, then it's not a random shuffle. For example, if I start playing the song "Across the Universe" by "Beatles", and the next song criteria is "artist with letter B or C" and it can only pick a Beatles song again because it's the only "B" or "C" artist I have in the collection, I will be sad. But a truly random shuffle could cause several songs from the same album or artist to be played in a row, which might be undesirable as well. I think I might try keeping a log of every song as it's played, to see whether a pattern clearly emerges.

Whatever they've done, it does seem to be an improvement, since the same songs don't keep coming up again within a short period of time as they used to.

 

[supratachophobia]

Interesting. If that's really what it's doing, then it's not a random shuffle. For example, if I start playing the song "Across the Universe" by "Beatles", and the next song criteria is "artist with letter B or C" and it can only pick a Beatles song again because it's the only "B" or "C" artist I have in the collection, I will be sad. But a truly random shuffle could cause several songs from the same album or artist to be played in a row, which might be undesirable as well. I think I might try keeping a log of every song as it's played, to see whether a pattern clearly emerges.

Whatever they've done, it does seem to be an improvement, since the same songs don't keep coming up again within a short period of time as they used to.

Try it yourself and see. I can see how in smaller collections this could be an issue. But with 6k songs, I find it acceptable.