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A bunch of media/music questions as I (impatiently) wait for delivery....

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It doesn't support playlists yet but may some day. You can put them in folders I think though. If you don't have a ton of songs in your play list you can manually do it with 'favorites' but it puts them in alphabetical order and not the order you want. Still very basic controls so needs to improve.
Ah... That'll work. I can just put the individual playlists into separate folders. Nice... I've been driving a 2004 Lexus GX which doesn't even have blue tooth, so this is a big step up for me. I do have blue tooth on my home receiver, but the sound quality is noticeably worse than any other format. Sounds very thin. Hopefully blue tooth in the MS will be a little better.
 
I spent $119 (on sale) for a 2TB portable hard drive, powered by the USB port. I put about 2000 CD's all in totally uncompressed FLAC (uncompressing or converting wav files using the dbpoweramp program) on the drive, with lots of room left over. The FLAC files allows all the metadata to be kept so I can see the album art, as opposed to wav and it sounds as good as the wav files which is the best sounding of the digital formats for CD's (what is on the CD itself). Since I use the files in both the Tesla and my hi-fi system (which costs more than the Tesla) I did lots of tests with various lossless compression formats before doing the uncompressed FLAC. BTW, the uncompressed FLAC files are slightly larger than wav files since they basically include the wav file plus the metadata. I think that if you are only listening to the music in a Tesla and not in a hi-fi system also, then lossless compression is fine and it saves space. Since I use the music in both and big storage is so cheap, uncompressed was the way to go for me. YMMV (your mileage may vary).
 
I'm apparently one of the few lucky enough to have no issues with Slacker. I have a Premium subscription, so I just create my own playlists on my tablet and then access them in my car.
It's probably highly dependent on where you live and how good the reception is there. When I took my test drive in Menlo Park, CA, Slacker worked perfectly. Small data point, but there you go...
 
Sounds like a pain to play sounds you bought...

The files I download from iTunes are AAC, which Tesla supports. (shrug) There are various formats people convert to that Tesla doesn't support...not just Apple Lossless...but AAC is the default for purchasing music (without Match--I had never heard it converted to Apple Lossless...and someone else here is saying it doesn't do that--what I thought)...so really, a non-issue unless you manually convert to other formats, it seems to me.

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iTunes Match doesn't upgrade to lossless format so they all should work fine. It upgrades them to a higher bit rate AAC format.

What I thought, but thanks for confirming.

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Unfortunately, 90% of my new music is all downloaded from iTunes Match @ 256k. I assume you can't get gold from straw, unless you're Rumplestiltskin.

Heh, indeed, but if the sound quality of the songs hasn't bothered you before, why should it suddenly now? ;-) With road noise in the S, fan if you have it on, honks or other noises from nearby cars...it's not like it's a soundproof room. If you've been happy with the sound, don't stress about it just for the car, of all places. Just my take on it, anyway.
 
Heh, indeed, but if the sound quality of the songs hasn't bothered you before, why should it suddenly now? ;-) With road noise in the S, fan if you have it on, honks or other noises from nearby cars...it's not like it's a soundproof room. If you've been happy with the sound, don't stress about it just for the car, of all places. Just my take on it, anyway.

I wasn't concerned. That was in response to someone telling us we should take our AAC and convert it to FLAC. You could theoretically do that, but the sound quality wouldn't be any better. The file would just be bigger. So my point was, there's no point. So no. Not concerned in the least. I think AAC is indistinguishable from CD rips. Sounds great to me. :)
 
So, I'm still confused -- does using a flash (or hard drive) of music copied from iTunes show up with all the associated metatag and album artwork?

At least with mine, using FLAC, the artwork appears to come from over the air (as sometimes it's wildly different than the normal artwork). I'm pretty sure the song titles come from the drive because I've imported some with different names and that's the name that shows up. Of course, about half my titles just show up as an X in a box and no artwork. Most have at least a few X in a box even if they show the artwork.