Can't play music off of my USB thumbdrive

[kirkbauer]

I just picked up my MS and I plugged in a thumb drive into the USB port. It lights up as if it is getting power, however I see no way to access the MP3s on it via the music section on the touchscreen. Any pointers?

Perhaps it is because the car doesn't recognize that I have music on there, or it is too large, etc? I do have the MP3s spread across a directory structure.

Any thoughts or suggestions?

 

[ra-san]

You are looking under my devices right?
What do you have the drive itself formatted as? Fat32 works. hfs (Mac's normal disk format) doesn't. Others, I'm not positive of - think it knows exfat and ext3/4, not sure about ntfs. It does scan directory structures.

 

[Zythryn]

It should show under Media, and then the My Devices screen.
It also may be the music format you are using.
What format music do you have on the USB?

If you use iTunes, here is a great thread on syncing your playlists: Easy iTunes playlist syncing for Tesla USB flash drive

Here is a discussion on converting files from the old DRM Apple format to one readable by the Model S: USB, Music Files, Best way to transfer from iTunes?

 

[swengl]

I agree with ra-san. The car won't recognize NTFS either (which if you use the default file system type when formatting from newer versions of Microsoft Windows OS). Try fat32. I have a 64 GB SANdisk thumb drive which works great in the car.

 

[kirkbauer]

Thanks everybody. It looks like my thumb drive was formatted as exfat which the car apparently didn't like. My Windows 7 system wouldn't format it as FAT32 but my guess is that is because 32GB is the limit for that filesystem?

I was able to use my Linux machine to make a 32GB fat32 partition on the thumb drive and it works great (I only have 30GB of music so not a big deal).

Thanks for the help!

 

[ra-san]

you can format >32 GB as fat32, but you may have to use another program or OS to do it.

 

[dkonigs]

Thanks everybody. It looks like my thumb drive was formatted as exfat which the car apparently didn't like. My Windows 7 system wouldn't format it as FAT32 but my guess is that is because 32GB is the limit for that filesystem?

I was able to use my Linux machine to make a 32GB fat32 partition on the thumb drive and it works great (I only have 30GB of music so not a big deal).

Thanks for the help!

If you have a Linux system, then you might as well just go all the way and format it with ext4 That's what I did with a 64GB thumbdrive, and it works great.

I just wish it wouldn't need to do a time-consuming full scan of the drive every time the car starts up, but I suppose that's an unrelated complaint.

 

[komills23]

If you have a Linux system, then you might as well just go all the way and format it with ext4 That's what I did with a 64GB thumbdrive, and it works great.

I just wish it wouldn't need to do a time-consuming full scan of the drive every time the car starts up, but I suppose that's an unrelated complaint.

If if your drive is formatted properly, you can use a much larger drive. I use a 1TB Samsung Flash drive and it works fine.

 

[stevem]

you can format >32 GB as fat32, but you may have to use another program or OS to do it.

I use this one myself: SD Card Formatter - SD Association

Will format fat32 on windows with larger SD cards.

 

[drdnl]

I work in IT so it's a little embarrassing to admit how many tries it took me to figure this out but just in case:
If you do format as ext4, make sure to set the permissions properly/wide open. Otherwise the car fails to scan the contents of you drive.

Which, now that I think about it, is strange. Why wouldn't the car just 'sudo' its way around? It's read only access, if you're paranoid, don't plug sensitive data into any 'foreign' OS/machine.

Anyway, if your car fails to read a drive. Format to ext4, mkdir music && chmod 777 -R music/

 

[Tamar]

We just bought a Seagate portable drive for music, since our old 160gb ipod won't work. To get music into the correct format off a mac or ipod, are the directions above applicable?

 

[jerry33]

We just bought a Seagate portable drive for music, since our old 160gb ipod won't work. To get music into the correct format off a mac or ipod, are the directions above applicable?

Should be.

 

[supratachophobia]

There is a little windows utility you can download called fat32formatter. It will allow formating of partitions greater than 32GB as Fat32.

Also, pro-tip, of you want to try and do playlists by genre or some other filter, you can do up to 4 logical partitions on a single physical storage device. The Tesla will see 4 USB devices per 1 stick. Use windows disk management to do this before you format with the other utility.

 

[thecloud]

I work in IT so it's a little embarrassing to admit how many tries it took me to figure this out but just in case:
If you do format as ext4, make sure to set the permissions properly/wide open. Otherwise the car fails to scan the contents of you drive.

Which, now that I think about it, is strange. Why wouldn't the car just 'sudo' its way around? It's read only access, if you're paranoid, don't plug sensitive data into any 'foreign' OS/machine.

It's not about what the 'foreign' OS might do to your data, but the opposite: the car must be paranoid about potentially bad data that you could be handing to it, intentionally or otherwise. Security holes are found in OS code every single day. If the car is running a process with superuser privileges and your malformed MP3 (or filesystem, or USB firmware, or whatever) happens to exploit a bug in its code, then malware could run on your car's OS with those privileges. Which, if you think about it, is scary.

 

[kirkbauer]

Also, pro-tip, of you want to try and do playlists by genre or some other filter, you can do up to 4 logical partitions on a single physical storage device. The Tesla will see 4 USB devices per 1 stick. Use windows disk management to do this before you format with the other utility.

Im definitely going to try this! Can you give the partitions names and will Tesla show them?

 

[Tamar]

And...we have an existing flash drive with lots of music already on it that we experimented with after picking up our car today. The 85D recognizes the flash drive and will play music off of it, but only one song at a time or one "complete" album at a time unless we program the songs we want into a favorites list "on the fly". I would not mind ripping some CDs onto a flash drive and using that for some of my on the road listening. Not having to create playlists is a big plus for me, so I was pleased to see that CDs would play in their entirety without much fuss. I guess that must have something to do with the whole concept of "playlists" not being around when I was a young 'un.

 

[supratachophobia]

Im definitely going to try this! Can you give the partitions names and will Tesla show them?

No, and when I found this out, I emailed Tesla to request for allowing the reading of the windows volume name from the storage media. So if in Windows, the disk is called "VOLUME1" or "TOSHIBA", the car will pick up on that. This way, we still don't have any writing to the USB storage media which I think is what Tesla really wants to avoid (considering the power-off/power-on conditions and how that can corrupt storage media).

As it stands now, the car will read USB1, USB2..., up to USB8. Please email them as well to get your request in to allow for reading of the storage volume name if present so the labels can actually be useful from the Media app.

Also, USB enclosure housing an SSD is the next step up from USB stick if you have storage space issues.

- - - Updated - - -

And...we have an existing flash drive with lots of music already on it that we experimented with after picking up our car today. The 85D recognizes the flash drive and will play music off of it, but only one song at a time or one "complete" album at a time unless we program the songs we want into a favorites list "on the fly". I would not mind ripping some CDs onto a flash drive and using that for some of my on the road listening. Not having to create playlists is a big plus for me, so I was pleased to see that CDs would play in their entirety without much fuss. I guess that must have something to do with the whole concept of "playlists" not being around when I was a young 'un.

Make sure your ID3 tags are accurate for album, artist, title. Then use the multiple volume trick I described above and place different genre's you may want to group together on each of them (for me, Current POP and 80's POP share a volume because no one minds having Michael Jackson follow The Editors). This way, you can fake a "playlist" by what is on the volume and have it consist of multiple genres. Or you can just play a whole genre. All without having to keep swapping in USB sticks. Which, now that I think of it, reminds me of swapping in CD's back in the day.

 

[drdnl]

It's not about what the 'foreign' OS might do to your data, but the opposite: the car must be paranoid about potentially bad data that you could be handing to it, intentionally or otherwise.

If sudo find /usb1 -name *.mp3 ever poses a security risk we're in trouble. Malformed inodes?

But that's just the 'where' part, my initial surprise.

Regarding 'what'
sudo cp file /tmp && chown mediauser /tmp/file && play /tmp/file

Would be an easy hack. Although I was referring to something more like bindfs

Basically ignore whatever the drive says, mount as user x. Nobody has more control over what not to run as root than root.

And even that is assuming the permissions are set extremely tight (600), you don't need to be root to read root.

Still surprised