Comprehensive USB Bug List

[jgs]

I was happy to get the Apple Music app but its operation is a bit of a mixed bag. All Apple Music playlists play without problems but playlists I have made (a mix of older RIPPED tracks with some Apple Music tracks) have playback problems. A track will play a couple of seconds then immediately skip to the next track for a couple of seconds to the next track and so on till it finds one it is willing to stream. This may or may not be either an Apple Music track or on of my RIPPED tracks. All of the latter were ripped at 256kbps. End result is, if I want to listen to one of my playlists I will play it from the Apple Music app on my phone. That way works as it has always done. The app needs more work.

Wait a minute, you've had success playing tracks you ripped yourself (and that you're sure are your own tracks, not being matched from Apple's own cloud service, which is a trick they do)?

I ask because when I tried it earlier, I had zero luck getting it to play my own, ripped tracks, that are in my "Cloud Library" or whatever Apple calls it, but are not publicly-available tracks. (For example, a family member's violin recital.) My surmise had been that they stream only stuff that's in the publicly available collection.

 

[TexasDuke]

I can’t wait until they find a way to make the “Home Screen” completely customizable for each owner / driver.

 

[tomstephens89]

Biggest annoyance with USB media for me is that Tesla doesn't sort media by Album Artist. So albums with different artists/composers (which is basically everything) get split up.

Workaround is to put the album artist into the artist tag.

 

[JimS]

Biggest annoyance with USB media for me is that Tesla doesn't sort media by Album Artist. So albums with different artists/composers (which is basically everything) get split up.

Workaround is to put the album artist into the artist tag.

I do that as well. Then to avoid “losing the identity” of the person sharing credit on a particular song I add a note in parentheses as a part of the song title, i.e. “(w/ India.Aire).” Duets albums are a real pain. I look forward to doing this for the new song by Miranda Lambert and Leon Bridges, If You Were Mine. If you are not already a fan of one or both you may become one. Check it out on YouTube.

 

[Merrill]

Be glad you don’t have a Rivian, you cannot use a usb for music. I have all my music on thumb drives and I’m unable to use that on my R1T. Cannot believe RJ did not make usb drives usable on the Rivian.

 

[Kevy Baby]

Biggest annoyance with USB media...

The USB music UX is absolutely horrible. It has the same usability of something that came out in the early 1990's

Until I added Tidal HiFi, 99% of my listening in my car was through USB (so that I could get lossless FLAC files). The sorting is horrible, so I created my own folder hierarchy (providing as an example only)

• The top level has five folders forced to the top by beginning their names with "A1 ", A2 ", etc.
  • One folder is "Rock Albums"
    • Several folders sorted by artist
  • One folder is "Albums"
    • Several folders sorted by artist
  • One folder is "Singles" (songs that don't fit in anywhere else)
  • One folder is "New Music" (for my recent additions to the library - not necessarily music that came out recently)
    • Several folders sorted by artist
  • One folder is "Demo"
• There are multiple Artist folders in here as well (for artists that I have multiple albums of)
  • Within each artist folder are folders for each album with the name of the folder starting with a number for the sequence of the age of the album (for example, for Steely Dan, the folders are "01 Can't Buy a Thrill," "02 Countdown to Ecstasy," "03 Pretzel Logic," etc.)

The one thing I still need to figure out is how to get the car to play double albums correctly. Right now, since all track are in a single folder, it will play both track 1s, then both track 2s, etc. I have made sure the meta data is correct, with delineation for Album 1 of 2 and Album 2 of 2, but that doesn't seem to be sufficient. I want to check if the FILE naming makes a difference and/or the album title meta data with inclusion of "Disc 1" and Disc 2" in the album name.

I also want to experiment to see if creating a shortcut to a track in another folder will work.

 

[TunaBug]

The USB music UX is absolutely horrible. It has the same usability of something that came out in the early 1990's

Until I added Tidal HiFi, 99% of my listening in my car was through USB (so that I could get lossless FLAC files). The sorting is horrible, so I created my own folder hierarchy (providing as an example only)

• The top level has five folders forced to the top by beginning their names with "A1 ", A2 ", etc.
  • One folder is "Rock Albums"
    • Several folders sorted by artist
  • One folder is "Albums"
    • Several folders sorted by artist
  • One folder is "Singles" (songs that don't fit in anywhere else)
  • One folder is "New Music" (for my recent additions to the library - not necessarily music that came out recently)
    • Several folders sorted by artist
  • One folder is "Demo"
• There are multiple Artist folders in here as well (for artists that I have multiple albums of)
  • Within each artist folder are folders for each album with the name of the folder starting with a number for the sequence of the age of the album (for example, for Steely Dan, the folders are "01 Can't Buy a Thrill," "02 Countdown to Ecstasy," "03 Pretzel Logic," etc.)

The one thing I still need to figure out is how to get the car to play double albums correctly. Right now, since all track are in a single folder, it will play both track 1s, then both track 2s, etc. I have made sure the meta data is correct, with delineation for Album 1 of 2 and Album 2 of 2, but that doesn't seem to be sufficient. I want to check if the FILE naming makes a difference and/or the album title meta data with inclusion of "Disc 1" and Disc 2" in the album name.

I also want to experiment to see if creating a shortcut to a track in another folder will work.

Somewhere on TMC, probably in this thread, I wrote about my solution to the "double album problem": for albums with tracks from multiple pieces of media (for example, disc 1, disc 2), I format the track number as "sprintf("%d%02d", discno, trackno)". The downside is that when looking at a track list the first track will be "101", and etc, but everything works as I want.

Is it ugly? Well, once you have accepted that you need to overwrite artist with albumartist, all kinds of things become acceptable

ETA: I don't recall if I do anything with the filenames for the double albums. Hopefully I'll remember to check when I get home. Ping me if I forget.

 

[JimS]

The one thing I still need to figure out is how to get the car to play double albums correctly.

I haven’t tried TunaBug’s solution. All my double albums are “two albums,” I.e. The White Album (Disc 1), The White Album (Disc 2). In the list of albums for each artist the two are rarely together or in order. I have no idea what determines that order. Of course it requires finding Disc 2 after Disc 1 completes, but I need to get up 3 times to play the vinyl White Album in the house, (which still sounds awesome by the way!).

 

[Kevy Baby]

I haven’t tried TunaBug’s solution. All my double albums are “two albums,” I.e. The White Album (Disc 1), The White Album (Disc 2). In the list of albums for each artist the two are rarely together or in order. I have no idea what determines that order. Of course it requires finding Disc 2 after Disc 1 completes, but I need to get up 3 times to play the vinyl White Album in the house, (which still sounds awesome by the way!).

But it sounds like you are relying on the car's native album "management" - something I gave up on a long time ago. I am really hoping to avoid having to have separate folders for each disc.

 

[Kevy Baby]

Somewhere on TMC, probably in this thread, I wrote about my solution to the "double album problem": for albums with tracks from multiple pieces of media (for example, disc 1, disc 2), I format the track number as "sprintf("%d%02d", discno, trackno)". The downside is that when looking at a track list the first track will be "101", and etc, but everything works as I want.

Is it ugly? Well, once you have accepted that you need to overwrite artist with albumartist, all kinds of things become acceptable

ETA: I don't recall if I do anything with the filenames for the double albums. Hopefully I'll remember to check when I get home. Ping me if I forget.

Ae you thinking of this post? I may give this a try

When sorting songs in an album, the "disc" tag is ignored and the filename is ignored. If you have a 2-CD album the Tesla will show two track "1" next to each other, then two track '2", etc. My solution for this is that for multi-track albums I prepend the disc number to the track number tag. In other words, I'll have track numbers 101, 102, 103,... 201, 202, 203. A format string of "%d%02d" is sufficient for me, but then I do not have any "albums" with more than 9 discs, so I can't tell you what it might do when sorting "101" and "1001".

 

[Kevy Baby]

And while we're talking USB music, I will chime in with a discovery I made a while ago. I used to use iTunes to manage all my music. Albums would get RIPed in using Apple Lossless and then when I would want to move them to my car. I would copy the files to the desktop and then use xACT to convert to FLAC.

I was running into occasional issues with this process clipping off the first couple of notes of track, so I started RIPing directly to FLAC using XLD. In addition to getting the opening notes back, I was also amazed at the sound difference - it was really noticeable! (Note: I do have an aftermarket system in my car.)

 

[TunaBug]

Ae you thinking of this post? I may give this a try

Yes, that was the one.

I checked the filenames that I have in the car. For albums with multiple physical media, the filenames are "%d-%02d" (disc and track). So similar to what I wrote above about the track number metadata in the file. But IIRC the filenames were not sufficient for making the car happy, it was the metadata hack that made it work.

Just FYI: I use the artist view for navigation. I see a list of artists. Tap on one, I see a list of albums. It's pretty much exactly what I want, with the caveat of needing to first mangle the metadata.

 

[sam-i-am]

Yes, that was the one.

I checked the filenames that I have in the car. For albums with multiple physical media, the filenames are "%d-%02d" (disc and track). So similar to what I wrote above about the track number metadata in the file. But IIRC the filenames were not sufficient for making the car happy, it was the metadata hack that made it work.

Just FYI: I use the artist view for navigation. I see a list of artists. Tap on one, I see a list of albums. It's pretty much exactly what I want, with the caveat of needing to first mangle the metadata.

Are you willing to share the python scripts you developed to convert your files for use on the USB drive ?

 

[Kevy Baby]

Yes, that was the one.

I checked the filenames that I have in the car. For albums with multiple physical media, the filenames are "%d-%02d" (disc and track). So similar to what I wrote above about the track number metadata in the file. But IIRC the filenames were not sufficient for making the car happy, it was the metadata hack that made it work.

Just FYI: I use the artist view for navigation. I see a list of artists. Tap on one, I see a list of albums. It's pretty much exactly what I want, with the caveat of needing to first mangle the metadata.

Just FYI: I updated the track numbers on the metadata and that didn't seem to work. I remember one thing you said in the post I linked to in post #2351 above about changing the name of volume to force a complete re-indexing. Going to see if that makes a difference.

 

[TexasDuke]

Just FYI: I updated the track numbers on the metadata and that didn't seem to work. I remember one thing you said in the post I linked to in post #2351 above about changing the name of volume to force a complete re-indexing. Going to see if that makes a difference.

What is the argument for not using your phone as your media drive? I am not following why someone would want to use an SSD with music instead of their phone which, for the majority of us, already has our music on it. What am I missing?

 

[TunaBug]

What is the argument for not using your phone as your media drive? I am not following why someone would want to use an SSD with music instead of their phone which, for the majority of us, already has our music on it. What am I missing?

My music library doesn't fit on my phone.

A lot of people are going to point out the benefits of lossless, which you can't get over Bluetooth (at least not in your Tesla) although I am skeptical of any sonic benefits of that in a car once you have road noise.

 

[Kevy Baby]

What is the argument for not using your phone as your media drive? I am not following why someone would want to use an SSD with music instead of their phone which, for the majority of us, already has our music on it. What am I missing?

My music library doesn't fit on my phone.

A lot of people are going to point out the benefits of lossless, which you can't get over Bluetooth (at least not in your Tesla) although I am skeptical of any sonic benefits of that in a car once you have road noise.

I have a very nice aftermarket sound system in my car. Sound quality is something I am passionate about and I got it with this system. I can absolutely hear the difference between BT streaming from my phone and a FLAC file through USB (something I could easy demo for any doubters). I can even hear the subtle differences between different RIPing methodologies*. While road noise is annoying, the volume can be turned up to mask most of it without being loud. No: it's not as good as listening at home on a good system or with good cans, but the only time I get to myself to be able to listen is in my daily commute, so this was the best choice for me.

Also, on an iPhone, the only way to get close to lossless audio is through Apple Music (and you have to specifically enable it in the settings - it is off by default). If you sync your music to your iPhone from your computer, it gets compressed. And then there is the issue of BT killing it anyways.

*I used to think that it was sufficient to RIP to lossless in iTunes (now called "Music") and then drag the files onto my desktop to convert to FLAC to save to the SSD drive for my car. However, I discovered that there is some degradation. I now RIP directly to FLAC. I am still limited to the 16-bit/44.1kHz of a CD, but it is better than the CD --> iTunes --> convert to FLAC route. Although I have been slowing replacing my CDs with downloads from HDTracks and other sources (I can't believe how many times I have purchased DSotM).

 

[lccreech]

Moderator note: This post was merged from a different thread.

The new Infotainment System has the same USB media bugs as before and more. The (icon) history for USB Music is populated with artwork from random streaming media sources and not artwork from the music metadata. The new Infotainment System does not return to playing the USB Media Source when returning to the car. Very very bad for podcasts stored on USB or expecting to listen to an album in its entirety. The album art for USB Music get stuck on the first song played on the instrument cluster until there is a change in "Media Sources". The old Infotainment System had all these bugs as well, with the exception that it did resume playing the USB Media source where it was before when returning to the car.

 

[lccreech]

I haven’t tried TunaBug’s solution. All my double albums are “two albums,” I.e. The White Album (Disc 1), The White Album (Disc 2). In the list of albums for each artist the two are rarely together or in order. I have no idea what determines that order. Of course it requires finding Disc 2 after Disc 1 completes, but I need to get up 3 times to play the vinyl White Album in the house, (which still sounds awesome by the way!).

What I do for double CDs is for the 2nd CD renumber all the tracks beginning with n+1 from CD 1. Then... doing the same within the meta data for each song. While I'm at it add a 200x200 jpeg image to each song for the cover art. I use Linux ImageMagic's convert for scaling the album art and Kid3 for manipulating the metadata. A lot of work, and it also exposes more bugs in Tesla's Infotainment USB player which I have complained for several years on deaf ears about.

 

[vcor]

Moderator note: This post was merged from a different thread.

The new Infotainment System has the same USB media bugs as before and more. The (icon) history for USB Music is populated with artwork from random streaming media sources and not artwork from the music metadata. The new Infotainment System does not return to playing the USB Media Source when returning to the car. Very very bad for podcasts stored on USB or expecting to listen to an album in its entirety. The album art for USB Music get stuck on the first song played on the instrument cluster until there is a change in "Media Sources". The old Infotainment System had all these bugs as well, with the exception that it did resume playing the USB Media source where it was before when returning to the car.

Yep, USB music software could use a bit of software work. It sounds like you have an older car. The new cars don't have any way to show music in the instrument cluster (problem fixed!).

To start up the USB where it last left off when you get in the car there are two tricks.
1) Have Sentry mode (for 2016 & later cars) on all the time. USB music will continue from where it stopped.
or
2) Use the voice command "Switch to USB".

Not perfect, but a workaround until they fix it.