Audio: Testing audio formats

[jcadman22]

Media Monkey can reflect whole trees into other formats and keep them sync'ed, if it comes to that.

(Says the guy that still has to re-rip his collection into FLAC).

+1 for MediaMonkey users - The feature that I most want the Model S to support would be the ability to emulate an iPod. I use the MediaMonkey iTunes plug-in to synch tracks from my tightly organized MM library into iTunes just so I can use the dead simple Apple device synch for all devices. I would love to have the wi-fi synch capability in the car so it would just show up as another device in iTunes when it' on my wi-fi network.

 

[howabout2]

On a long drive, playing from the car's flash drive means that you don't have to have your phone plugged in to keep it charged. Because a lot of car chargers cause the "charger is incompatible" message intermittently, and also cause the phone's battery to heat up way more than the 120V charger, it seems like a reasonable plan both for convenience and cellphone battery life--both kinds of battery life. (I am so looking forward to not having to plug the phone into the cassette adapter.)

Presumably the USB ports are out of the way in a fashion that would allow you to essentially permanently plug in a 128 or 256GB USB stick? If so, that's how I plan to compensate for the relatively paltry in-car storage.

(Frankly I hate it when capacity is measured in the "songs" unit since I have no idea what that means. 500 songs is what exactly? 2.5GB? My MP3-encoded music is roughly 5MB/song.)

 

[jerry33]

(Frankly I hate it when capacity is measured in the "songs" unit since I have no idea what that means. 500 songs is what exactly? 2.5GB? My MP3-encoded music is roughly 5MB/song.)

+1 Capacity should be stated in gigabytes or terabytes.

 

[ManuVince]

+1 Capacity should be stated in gigabytes or terabytes.

+1

And I think it is listed in number of songs, because of the very poor data storage capacity the car has (in today's standard where you can buy a 32Gb flash drive for 30$), doesn't look very appealing.
In the end I don't care much about that. But it really puzzles me... Why so few? It doesn't cost anything...

 

[kevincwelch]

(Frankly I hate it when capacity is measured in the "songs" unit since I have no idea what that means. 500 songs is what exactly? 2.5GB? My MP3-encoded music is roughly 5MB/song.)

I hate it as well.

When manufacturers do this, they probably calculate it based on encoding of 128 kbps, which any reasonable person would be able to tell the difference between this and CD-quality music. Most of my music is encoded at 192 kbps or 256 kbs, and more recently since space is not an issue so much, 320 kbps.

Roughly, in 128 kbps, the song is as large as it is in minutes. Roughly. So, a 3:30 song is about about 3.5 Mb. 500 songs at 128 kbps is about 1.75 GB. So, the car probably has about a 2 GB capacity before formatting. At a 320 kpbs encryption rate, a 4 minute song is about 10 Mb. Assuming my rough math is close to accurate, a 2 GB storage device will hold 175 songs with higher encryption.

For the flac lovers out there, a 4 minute song is about 25 Mb. So, you're gonna fit about 70 songs on there.

Of course, I stopped doing math about 20 years ago, so I could be completely off...

 

[jerry33]

In the end I don't care much about that. But it really puzzles me... Why so few? It doesn't cost anything...

My best guess is that it was the specified four years ago when the specs were first made--and the size would have been reasonable--and no one has bothered to update it because they were busy with higher priority items.

 

[Andrew Wolfe]

I think it is very likely that the system uses an SDHC card for storage. The limit is 32GB. Moving to SDXC can require a different controller on the processor chip. Tegra 2 did not support it - but at least some versions of Tegra 3 do - so it should be upgradable. I think Tegra 3 was a late-stage upgrade so that could explain it.

 

[dsm363]

As long as the upgrade path is relatively easy and cheap, I don't think most people will mind the initial weak storage space.

 

[kendallpb]

I think a reasonable question would be whether it will decode music downloaded from the iTunes store, which is AAC format, but with DRM. For obvious reasons, many players will be incapable of decoding these AAC files. (There are commercial ways around that.) I'm not sure how many people actually have their music encoded in AAC format that isn't from Apple.

I've bought non-Apple AACs, and RIP'd all my CDs as AAC. Anyway, FYI Apple hasn't sold DRM'd music for quite some time now, so while folks who've used the iTunes Store for quite some time (like me) have some DRM'd AACs from Apple, that's really a thing of the past. (You can "upgrade" to non-DRM'd + higher quality tracks, not that I'd waste money doing that.)

 

[kevincwelch]

Didn't know that, kendallpb.

I usually buy from either the band itself or from Amazon.

 

[brianman]

Ideally one of the various converter apps would have a feature: "convert to set of precanned formats for testing a new device".

In the absence of that, a set of human recommendations of formats to include (some in the thread are a start) combined with an app that can easily do a bulk export of set of user-specified formats in batch.

Audacity and MediaMonkey don't seem to have that. I'll try doing a few manually, but batch is more reliable and strongly preferred.

 

[brianman]

Manually sucks, but it wasn't terribly RSI-inducing. Here are some that I've converted so far...

MediaMonkey

1. FLAC0
2. FLAC6
3. FLAC8
4. MP3ABR160
5. MP3ABR192
6. MP3ABR256
7. MP3CBR128
8. MP3CBR320
9. MP3VBR160
10. MP3VBR256
11. OGG2
12. OGG5
13. OGG10
14. WAV22050M
15. WAV22050S
16. WAV44100M
17. WAV44100S
18. WAV48000M
19. WAV48000S
20. WMA_ABR
21. WMA_CBR1
22. WMA_CBR2
23. WMA_VBR
24. WMALossless
25. WMAProABR
26. WMAProCBR1
27. WMAProCBR2
28. WMAProVBR
29. WMASpeechCBR1

Audacity

1. AIFF
2. GSM_6_10
3. MP2_160
4. MP2_192
5. MP2_256
6. MP2_320

Audacity needs some additional downloads or configuring for ffmpeg so I didn't bother with it.

Any additional formats requested (and tools suggested to produce them)?


NOTE: I've limited the filenames to alphanumeric 8.3 to avoid potential "sensitivity" in the Tesla file support.

USB key 1: 4GB FAT32, all the formats above
USB key 2: 128MB FAT, a subset of the formats above

 

[brianman]

Update:
My Tesla co-pilot was accomodating, but we only had time to test the smaller FAT key. It seemed to play all the formats that I through at it, which included at least one of FLAC, MP#, OGG, WAV, and WMA. I'm not 100% sure it didn't "skip reject" some (because I was driving while she clicked through them) but it definitely did not "stall for a few seconds" reject any of them.

Also note: the prototype at Bellevue mall (a) doesn't have a USB port and (b) has the wireless locked down. So no additional testing could be done there.

 

[Jason S]

Was it pretty easy for her to find the files and just skip through them?

Thanks for the testing!

 

[brianman]

I didn't see any "explorer" style user interface. She was just clicking the next button through them, giving about 5 sec of play time each. (Same song in different formats.)

 

[Bound466]

Very cool, thanks Brianman for checking that out. Very promising. Did it show you the file type on the screen as she played each file?

I wonder if had the system only found 2 or 3 file types it recognized (out of the whole lot), but kept cycling through the same 2-3 files, it might appear that its playing more than just the 2-3 it recognized. Especially if you didn't see the file type being played.

 

[gmontem]

It is probably playing only recognized file types, skipping those using unsupported codecs like FLAC. I think future audio tests should use recordings of yourself speaking out the audio codec used, e.g., "If you can hear this, Model S can play two channel 24-bit 96 kHz FLAC."

 

[brianman]

Typically when formats are rejected by devices I've tried in the past, there's at least a few seconds where it tries and then aborts. I didn't see signs of that. Not definitive, but optimistic.

And, yah, if I do the test again I'll try to have different content in each encoding so that it's easier to analyze.

 

[kevincwelch]

Update:
My Tesla co-pilot was accomodating, but we only had time to test the smaller FAT key. It seemed to play all the formats that I through at it, which included at least one of FLAC, MP#, OGG, WAV, and WMA. I'm not 100% sure it didn't "skip reject" some (because I was driving while she clicked through them) but it definitely did not "stall for a few seconds" reject any of them.

Also note: the prototype at Bellevue mall (a) doesn't have a USB port and (b) has the wireless locked down. So no additional testing could be done there.

Thanks for the update.

When you were playing the songs, did the ID3, etc. tags display the appropriate information (including album pics) on the screen?

I am very curious to see if the display comes up with a list of folders (as in Windows Explorer or my Garmin) from which you can touch and select.

 

[Jason S]

Typically when formats are rejected by devices I've tried in the past, there's at least a few seconds where it tries and then aborts. I didn't see signs of that. Not definitive, but optimistic.

And, yah, if I do the test again I'll try to have different content in each encoding so that it's easier to analyze.

Could just do some negative path testing -- rename a text file or two as ".MP3" and watch it barf or skip.