Comprehensive USB Bug List

[David29]

Actually technically speaking I believe it's sorting files by the track numbers in the tags - I did some messing around with this when they fixed it (not actually a recent fix, but it was an easy one to miss), and I seem to recall that if you remove the leading numbers from the file names the tracks still show up in track order according to the numbers in the tags. I could be remembering my experimentation and the results wrong though. But still, whatever, it's still a pretty big win in the "please tesla fix this" realm!

Edit: ignore that part above - I redid my little experiment, and You Are Correct® and I had indeed misremembered. It is indeed sorting by file names - if you have a leading number in the file name all is good. It is then displaying the track name that is in the tag, not the rest of the name in the file name. This is all correct behavior, Yay!

Oh, and I reran another little test - I've been collecting files that didn't play all the way to the end, but were cut off 2-5 seconds before they were supposed to. I had them in a dropbox that I shared with tesla. All of those files now play correctly, all the way to the end. Another Yay!

Oh, and...

Sorry for being a model 3 owner poking into a model S thread, but... is the resume after power cycle thing still broken on model S's, or does it at least work as I described it a few posts up?

My issue (at the moment) is numerous repeated entries of the same album name in the album list, apparently one entry for each song in certain albums (not all). Can someone state what tesla's current logic is for indexing albums? is it some combination of album name and some other field, that causes the multiple entries? It seems to happen mostly with mixes with multiple artists...

 

[aesculus]

My issue (at the moment) is numerous repeated entries of the same album name in the album list, apparently one entry for each song in certain albums (not all). Can someone state what tesla's current logic is for indexing albums? is it some combination of album name and some other field, that causes the multiple entries? It seems to happen mostly with mixes with multiple artists...

We have discussed this up thread repeatedly but with so many pages and issues it can get lost.

The net of it is that in Album view, Tesla looks at track artist and not album artist in arranging albums. For a few months in 2016 they used album artist and then destroyed it, never to be seen again.

So unfortunately you will need to get a ID tag tool and make sure that every track in an album has the exact same artist label. For compilation albums or where multiple artists contribute to a track, which is different track by track, you will have to create your own.

For example I have an album by Clean Bandit. On the CD I ripped the Album Artist is Clean Bandit. But every track has a unique set of artists. On the Tesla the twelve tracks on the album create twelve album views.

So I overwrote the artist ID on each of the tracks to be Clean Bandit. Now in album view I have one Clean Bandit album, What is Love, where I had twelve before, each with one track.

The problem with this is I no longer have visibility of the artist themselves. They don't show up in the track display when playing and if I did an Artist view in the Tesla, they won't show up there either with those tracks that were modified.

 

[David29]

We have discussed this up thread repeatedly but with so many pages and issues it can get lost.

The net of it is that in Album view, Tesla looks at track artist and not album artist in arranging albums. For a few months in 2016 they used album artist and then destroyed it, never to be seen again.

So unfortunately you will need to get a ID tag tool and make sure that every track in an album has the exact same artist label. For compilation albums or where multiple artists contribute to a track, which is different track by track, you will have to create your own.

For example I have an album by Clean Bandit. On the CD I ripped the Album Artist is Clean Bandit. But every track has a unique set of artists. On the Tesla the twelve tracks on the album create twelve album views.

So I overwrote the artist ID on each of the tracks to be Clean Bandit. Now in album view I have one Clean Bandit album, What is Love, where I had twelve before, each with one track.

The problem with this is I no longer have visibility of the artist themselves. They don't show up in the track display when playing and if I did an Artist view in the Tesla, they won't show up there either with those tracks that were modified.

If I change the track Artist in a compilation album to be something like "Various Artists," can I leave the Album Artist field populated with the correct artist name? Or do I need to clear that or revise it as well?

 

[aesculus]

If I change the Album Artist in a compilation album to be something like "Various Artists," can I leave the Track Artist field populated with the correct artist name? Or do I need to clear that or revise it as well?

Nope. Tesla does not look at Album Artist tags at all anymore.

 

[araxara]

No, not in my case. No USB shows up....
MCU1 car.

My MCU1 car's USB now works fine under V 2020.12.11.5. I hadn't driven the car for a while and this was a new update. USB didn't work on the previous update. It seems to also load much quicker now.

 

[David29]

Nope. Tesla does not look at Album Artist tags at all anymore.

Well, I edited the metadata for the few compilation albums I have in which the "Various artists" tag would be appropriate as the album artist, and re-loaded the USB stick. That works fine, so now I can play an entire compilation album at one time if I want to.

But as I was driving around listening yesterday, it occurred to me that a different solution might work and still preserve the actual artist on each track. I could create a distinct Genre for a particular compilation album, and call it something like "Pop Favorites of the 80s" or whatever the album title is. Then to hear the album, I could play that Genre. If I left the track artist entries as they originally are, those names would be displayed as the relevant artist when the song played. The only disadvantage I can see would be that the songs on such an album would not play with whatever actual genre they were if you wanted to play a mix of songs across multiple albums.

This approach might be unattractive if you have a large number of compilation albums, but seems practical for a handful.

This option was probably discussed someplace in the 100 pages above, but please forgive me for not searching all through the entries for it!

 

[aesculus]

Got my USB music back finally with 2020.16.2.1

 

[navinbits]

I just got my MY a week ago and I am having problems with the USB audio. I got a 128GB flash drive and partitioned it for sentry and music. Sentry works fine, but music is all loading error. I tried the following things but no luck -

1. Reformat the flash drive and use it only for music. I bought a name brand Sandisk high performance one - NOT WORKING
2. Use a different thumb drive for music. I used a name brand USB here as well - NOT WORKING
3. ONLY thing that works is my OLLLLLD Mp3 player, and even there, only mp3 already existing inside the old player will play fine.. Any new mp3s I load on to it will not work.

The symptoms are all the same.. When Tesla loads the mp3s from the USB, all the track lengths are either having no track time information or incorrect information. For example, a 3 minute song shows up as 29 minutes etc, and of course doesn't load. I tried converting the mp3 to flac as well, and still no luck... Anybody has a foolproof way of getting mp3 to work off USB? The last thing I want to do is connect my phone through bluetooth and load the mp3 through my phone.

 

[sduck]

I'm suspecting dud or fake flash drives. Name brand ones mean nothing - those are the ones most often faked. Lots of people have gotten flash drives to work, although it's not the best medium for the crappy implementation of the USB system as it currently exists. Make sure it's formatted in fat32 (ext4 if possible), and that you're using fairly standard mp3 or flac files. There are some other formats that are maybe supported, but i've had less luck with them.

 

[navinbits]

@sduck thanks for your reply... But this still doesn't explain why all my songs that I have copied for the last 10 years play fine on the MY from my old MP3 player, but any new songs I copy to that same mp3 player has this "loading error" issue. I have a 10 year old cowon Iaudio mp3 player where I have accrued all my music for all these years. All those tracks work perfectly fine. Just some new tracks I added to check on the model Y don't work. I suspect something other than a corrupted USB... But I can't pinpoint what the issue could be though.

 

[wdolson]

Tesla's USB player is finicky about the format of the drive. If it plays OK somewhere else, then it's not a problem with the drive being counterfeit.

All drives, hard drives, USB, and floppies have a file system that needs to be there before files are put on. Most USB drives come standard with the FAT32 file system formatted, but sometimes a computer may format a USB drive with a different file system. The Tesla USB player will not recognize other file systems than FAT32.

I would recommend getting another brand new USB drive, put a few MP3s on it and see if the car recognizes that. If that works, copy all the files you want to it. I have a 4 year old Model S, so things may be a bit different, but I found that the USB player more reliably works with drives under 32GB. I had a big drive with tons of music on a road trip and the system was sometimes seeing it and sometimes not. It would also spend lots of time rescanning the drive (a bad problem in the old firmware that I think is better now). I picked up a 16GB drive and transferred the stuff I really wanted to it with my laptop that night and it's played fine with that stick ever since. That was 3 1/2 years ago.

At least on my car the USB ports are USB 2 and I only use USB 2 drives. I've never tried a USB 3 drive, though it should be backwardly compatible.

 

[tomas]

@sduck thanks for your reply... But this still doesn't explain why all my songs that I have copied for the last 10 years play fine on the MY from my old MP3 player, but any new songs I copy to that same mp3 player has this "loading error" issue. I have a 10 year old cowon Iaudio mp3 player where I have accrued all my music for all these years. All those tracks work perfectly fine. Just some new tracks I added to check on the model Y don't work. I suspect something other than a corrupted USB... But I can't pinpoint what the issue could be though.

Old tracks work, new ones don’t, hmmm. How are you getting new tracks onto the drive? Ripping? Copying? What setup? All I can think is that you are getting bad tagging on the new files.

 

[f205v]

Let me add a new one!
Since 2020.24.6.11 my Model S is giving load error with a few FLAC files.
I investigated the issue, and it appears that the bug is related to the sampling frequency of the file.
It loads and plays fine with sampling frequencies up to 48000Hz. For anything above it, it gives a load error.
This bug was not present in previous firmware releases, and all the files where loading and playing fine regardless of their sampling freq.
Attached pic shows where the error occurs: above red line everything is fine, below red line it fails.

 

[Warbird]

my Model S is giving load error with a few FLAC files.

I too rely on FLAC. My entire music collection rides with me. With MCU1 I hit a limit to the amount of songs I could place on one USB device. I say "amount" because I did not definitively determine if it was the number of songs or the size (GB) of the collection. I ended up splitting the collection across two sticks. There are about 5,000 songs on each.

I have since upgraded my 2017 S75 from MCU1/AP2.5 to MCU2/AP3/HW2, but have yet to test if that limit still exists.

The player interface so sucks. This is first thing I'm going to mention to Elon when I run onto him
Later versions of the firmware have gotten even worse. It no longer displays the file type (MP3, FLAC, etc.)

20 years ago I owned a "RIO" hard drive based, Linux based car head unit that not only had playlists, but could pivot. Pivot is when you are listening to a song in a playlist and you want to "pivot" to another song by the same artist or genre or album. Basic stuff like that could be implemented quickly by a few dedicated software engineers. On the other hand not selling out to CarPlay or some other sucky system is good for me.

 

[dfwatt]

I too rely on FLAC. My entire music collection rides with me. With MCU1 I hit a limit to the amount of songs I could place on one USB device. I say "amount" because I did not definitively determine if it was the number of songs or the size (GB) of the collection. I ended up splitting the collection across two sticks. There are about 5,000 songs on each.

I have since upgraded my 2017 S75 from MCU1/AP2.5 to MCU2/AP3/HW2, but have yet to test if that limit still exists.

The player interface so sucks. This is first thing I'm going to mention to Elon when I run onto him
Later versions of the firmware have gotten even worse. It no longer displays the file type (MP3, FLAC, etc.)

20 years ago I owned a "RIO" hard drive based, Linux based car head unit that not only had playlists, but could pivot. Pivot is when you are listening to a song in a playlist and you want to "pivot" to another song by the same artist or genre or album. Basic stuff like that could be implemented quickly by a few dedicated software engineers. On the other hand not selling out to CarPlay or some other sucky system is good for me.

Yeah it needs a lot of work. Add to the list of things that you can't generate a playlist either from some other Music app that you can then import or on the system itself.

 

[PhilDavid]

Do Tesla executives know there is a thread with over 2000 posts about the unfixed bugs with the USB music player?

The weird thing is with all the talent they have, they can likely get a very small team to fix all the USB music player bugs in a week or so if they wanted but there seems to be no interest in fixing the one app that is used the most often.

Can anyone who has some influence tweet about fixing the music player issues?

 

[Merrill]

This has been an issue since I purchased my first Tesla in 2013, not something they care about.

 

[DCEV]

Let me add a new one!
Since 2020.24.6.11 my Model S is giving load error with a few FLAC files.
I investigated the issue, and it appears that the bug is related to the sampling frequency of the file.
It loads and plays fine with sampling frequencies up to 48000Hz. For anything above it, it gives a load error.
This bug was not present in previous firmware releases, and all the files where loading and playing fine regardless of their sampling freq.
Attached pic shows where the error occurs: above red line everything is fine, below red line it fails.

So does this mean someone is working on the music player code?

 

[tpedwards]

So does this mean someone is working on the music player code?

Let's hope so. But introducing this bug could have been a side effect of changes to the XM-Sirius interface.

 

[f205v]

I do tend to agree with @tpedwards .
It looks like a bug from oversight in something else, and not a rewrite error in the USB code.