Audio: Album Artwork Not Appearing

[Todd Burch]

Hi Guys,

I've got my music collection on a 32 GB USB drive right now. It's a combination of MP3s and AACs (m4a), mostly at 320 kbps with some as low as 128 kbps.

All of the music plays fine, but the problem is that for the majority of the songs, album artwork is not appearing. I haven't done extensive testing, but it seems like the artwork is displaying for the .m4a files but not the MP3s.

In the course of investigating this, I downloaded a trial version of kid3 (a media metadata tagging app for OS X) because I thought maybe iTunes was causing the issue. Looking at the music files, the metadata is all there--correctly.

Any ideas what's going on? Have you had luck with album artwork, and if so, any ideas why my music might not be showing artwork for most songs?

 

[dflye]

I don't think they are using the artwork info embedded in the media files; it seems that they are getting the album art from some 3rd party source over the 3G connection.

From what I've seen, it is hit or miss on whether it correctly identifies the media and gets the correct art... for me it has made multiple wrong choices so far.

I thought most music identification systems were based upon the number of tracks and the time length of each track, as that is usually enough to uniquely identify any album. Or should I say CD? Or group of media files? Either way, my media was all ripped from original CDs, so should have the proper count/timing to ID them, but apparently not so much with whatever Tesla is using to acquire album art.

 

[Todd Burch]

With all due respect, I'm not so sure that's correct, dflye (although to disagree more firmly I'd have to do some more experimentation!)

Some songs, even after powering the car back on (and the USB drive requiring a re-scan) still have artwork in them, whereas others don't. It would be strange to download some artwork and not others when I haven't even played anything since the car was powered up.

If what you say is correct though, that's really weird. I hope Tesla enables this in an update fairly soon. It's really stupid to continuously re-download album art instead of using metadata artwork when it wastes a lot of bandwidth and could use the wrong artwork.

- - - Updated - - -

OK, I just checked on this.

The car is definitely NOT just downloading the artwork. Car's in the garage with no 3G coverage right now (I live in a rural area). I conducted a simple test by copying 3 songs to a blank jump drive--two of which were songs which I remembered to have been showing artwork, and one which didn't. Immediately when I put the jump drive in, the artwork was there on the 2 songs.

So it IS reading metadata.

The car did NOT see the stored picture from one MP4 AAC file (m4a).
The car DID see the artwork from another MP4 AAC file (m4a).

The metadata tagging software (kid3) indicated that both songs had artwork stored with them.

The car DID see the artwork from an MP3 file, and here's the crazy part: the metadata tagging software (kid3) did NOT recognize that there was any artwork stored in the metadata! Now I'm more confused than ever!

I'll get to the bottom of this, I hope. I need artwork for every song!

Step one: Get different tagging software...

 

[FlasherZ]

The car caches album information and artwork.

I had to have Tesla log in and clear out my album/art cache, because a local radio station's datastream was corrupt and sent the same album name for EVERY SONG it played. It remembers this regardless of the source -- for example, when Rascall Flatts popped up on my Slacker station, it displayed the same wrong album name that it learned from FM HD radio. Service told me they could log in remotely to do it, because I could not do it myself.

 

[dflye]

Some songs, even after powering the car back on (and the USB drive requiring a re-scan) still have artwork in them, whereas others don't. It would be strange to download some artwork and not others when I haven't even played anything since the car was powered up.

If what you say is correct though, that's really weird. I hope Tesla enables this in an update fairly soon. It's really stupid to continuously re-download album art instead of using metadata artwork when it wastes a lot of bandwidth and could use the wrong artwork.

Sorry, I forgot to mention the caching that FlasherZ talks about.

So the annoying thing, once it gets bad art, it is cached apparently forever. At least the cached bad data persisted even after I'd corrected it on the USB and restarted the touchscreen... neither a soft nor a hard reboot convinced it to flush the cache from what I recall.

 

[aviators99]

I haven't used the USB yet, but have had some weird experiences with BT Audio. Sometimes it gets artwork and sometimes it doesn't. But what's really weird is that sometimes it gets *DIFFERENT* artwork for the same song! One time, instead of the album art I got a photograph of the credited singer(!?)

 

[Todd Burch]

Wow, disappointing. Tesla, time to fix this. I really thought the media player would be WAY further on in the game at this point. I can't even search my local music! Seriously. Media files with artwork metadata should USE it. Sheesh.

 

[dsm363]

I have one song that always shows the album art of a different song even though it's correct on the file. They do have more work to do of course but the integration with my iPhone and USB drive are decent at this point. Much better than the Roadster at least.

 

[Todd Burch]

Much better than the Roadster at least.

Maybe, but I hope the Roadster's infotainment system is not setting the standard for the Model S . If so I'm up for some big disappointment!

 

[Robert.Boston]

Two further oddities:
1. The "once-learned, always-remembered" theme carries over to radio stations. The Model S has locked in a particular album cover for WGBH (FM 89.7), apparently the first album art it linked to something they played. Very odd to see album cover art while listening to All Things Considered.
2. It works hard to find approximate albums. I do a lot of field recordings of folk music, and I label these tracks with the customary tune names. (Recordings posted HERE.) Notwithstanding that these are my personal recordings, the Model S diligently (and erroneously) matches them up with commercial recordings with similar track names.

 

[dsm363]

Maybe, but I hope the Roadster's infotainment system is not setting the standard for the Model S . If so I'm up for some big disappointment!

Good point. I think it's one of the many things that needs refinement. The basics are there and works extremely well but there is still a lot of work. After 2 years of dealing with that crappy Alpine unit, even the basic Model S version is amazing.

 

[FlasherZ]

So the annoying thing, once it gets bad art, it is cached apparently forever. At least the cached bad data persisted even after I'd corrected it on the USB and restarted the touchscreen... neither a soft nor a hard reboot convinced it to flush the cache from what I recall.

File a case with service, they will log into your car and clear the cache for you. Hopefully we'll see an option in the future to clear it (or a special search sequence or something).

 

[kitk]

File a case with service, they will log into your car and clear the cache for you. Hopefully we'll see an option in the future to clear it (or a special search sequence or something).

To me the most frustrating part of the Album Art implementation is when it comes to Podcast listening. You end up with completely random/arbitrary album art unrelated to what you are listening to most of the time.

To me the solution is simple. Embedded album art should take priority. If it isn't present, search online.

 

[FlasherZ]

To me the most frustrating part of the Album Art implementation is when it comes to Podcast listening. You end up with completely random/arbitrary album art unrelated to what you are listening to most of the time.

To me the solution is simple. Embedded album art should take priority. If it isn't present, search online.

You should provide that feedback to [email protected]. They can add it to "the list".

 

[Todd Burch]

Looks like the car isn't downloading album art either. I put about 50 songs on the drive and listened on the hour-long drive to work this morning. Not one of them had artwork downloaded to it. So it sounds like Tesla just isn't on top of this issue yet.

 

[sublimaze1]

This makes sense (the two big issues I see - album art not appearing and 1st cache'd image being default) that they are interrelated. I had spent hours pulling my songs off the usb and re-tagging them and then re-uploading them without success. So what I am hearing is have service clear the cache and then listen to the songs "for a first time" again and the appropriate album art will load (if I have tagged it)?

 

[nrcooled]

Two further oddities:
1. The "once-learned, always-remembered" theme carries over to radio stations. The Model S has locked in a particular album cover for WGBH (FM 89.7), apparently the first album art it linked to something they played. Very odd to see album cover art while listening to All Things Considered.

I have noticed the same thing when listening to NPR's All Things Considered.

 

[rsquared99]

If I may ask a question, why does anybody want album art to display? What does it do for you, especially in a car? Sorry, just an old fogie trying to understand why this seems to be topic of concern.

 

[dflye]

If I may ask a question, why does anybody want album art to display? What does it do for you, especially in a car? Sorry, just an old fogie trying to understand why this seems to be topic of concern.

When scanning through a large collection of albums on USB by album / artist, I can pick things out visually vs having to read the text. On the older firmware, so I don't have the version of the media app that let you skip around faster.

 

[aviators99]

If I may ask a question, why does anybody want album art to display? What does it do for you, especially in a car? Sorry, just an old fogie trying to understand why this seems to be topic of concern.

"Because it's cool" may sound like a lame answer, but if that answer wasn't acceptable for things regarding this car, a good number of features wouldn't be there!