So, let’s try this again.
Get ready. It's a very long post, even for me. Read the bold headings if you want to jump ahead.
Bert’s Media Player 8.0 2.38.19 Observations & Workarounds V2
Caveats ON:
Your perspective may be different than mine, as I’ve attempted to test what is most important to me, along with a few other things I’ve made mental note as being important to some others across TMC. There are just too many combinations, and as I’m not being paid to debug or document all this, well, you get what you get, from just my own POV.
In other words, pot shots will be ignored. 
Caveats OFF:
Physical USB Device Characteristics & Formats
- USB 2.0 (See Note #1)
- 2GB, 8GB, 16GB, 128GB, 256GB (perhaps others)
- Format: FAT, FAT32; (not exFAT or NTFS)
- Volume Label now displays in the UI, but see BUG #1 below
Supported Audio (Encoding) Formats
- AAC, AIF, FLA, FLAC, M4A Lossy, MP3, OGA (OGG Vorbis) play, utilize basic ID3 tagging & support Album Art (see below)
- WAV will play, but is an older format that inconsistently supports more recent ID3 specifications and Album Art (there are issues that I would never hold Tesla accountable for). IMHO, it’s best to convert to a more fully supported open format for use in your MS.
- M4A Lossless has a BUG (see #2 below) and/or sadly continues to be unsupported
- MWV (Microsoft proprietary) is ignored. Sorry to you diehards!
- M4V, PDF are correctly ignored
Basic ID3 Tagging
- ALBUM (title) - used correctly
- ALBUMARTIST - not used, but perhaps should be. See BUGS #4 below.
- DISCNUMBER - not used. See BUGS #3 below.
- GENRE - used correctly
- PARTOFCOMPILATION - not used
- TRACKARTIST - used correctly, perhaps to a fault. See BUGS #4 below.
- TRACKNUMBER - not used. See BUGS #3 below.
- TRACKTITLE - used
Album Artwork
NOTE: Valid art may not immediately display within the UI. Accessing and/or scaling art appears to be a lower-priority secondary process which is fine.
Just don’t get worried your Art is missing without giving it some time (a good minute or more) to be displayed and perhaps placed in cache.
- Formats
- I only tested and personally care about Album Art that follows the ID3V2 Embedded Image Extension standard, meaning the art travels with the encoded audio in the same physical file — not as a sidecar file. This spec allows nearly any format to be used, but says png or jpeg should be used for best interoperability. I use both.
- At least JPG, PNG work. I didn’t test the plethora of other possibilities, including PDF that at least one other has reported success with. While I can’t explain the exact internal issue, there is at least one BUG (see #5 below) impacting me.
- Dimensions
- The ID3 spec does not specify min or max. I tested both jpg and png from <300 to 1500x1500 in 100 increments. Tesla appears to appropriately scale art into it’s UI with formats it supports.
- Image Type
- The spec has 15 different types that can be specified — I only tested the following combinations. My suggestion is if you tagging tool gives you the option, the Album Art you want displayed in your Tesla should be the very first “Front Cover”:
- Front Cover (Single) - displays correctly
- Front Cover (Multiple) - only first one displays (that’s OK)
- Front Cover & Back Cover - only front cover displays (that’s OK)
M3U Playlists
- Continue to not be supported
Search
- If the new 8.0 Media Search supports USB and ID3 Tags, I’ve not been successful getting it to work by typing varying entries of ALBUMTITLE, TRACKTITLE, or TRACKARTIST in the search box (exact match or partial) or via verbal command. Only non-USB sources are displayed in the results I received with 10 different tests
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BUGS & Da Guy’s Biggest Hot Button List (Your list is likely different or more extensive — I’ve tried not to go too crazy)
BUG 1: USB Device Volume Label does not properly handle spaces and less common characters
- Workaround is to just not have imbedded blanks or anything other than basic characters such as A-Z, a-z, 0-9, and a few others in the name you choose
- Media Player scans these tracks and processes their ID3 tags like other supported formats (including .M4A Lossy), populating these tracks throughout the UI available for play, but then displays “loading error” when the track is selected for playback. These lossless tracks should either be ignored or preferably, the format be fully supported. It’s been open format for 5+ years and is fairly common to Apple-users.
- Workaround is to convert any M4A Lossless source files to a supported format before use in your Tesla. FLAC Lossless is a quick and easy choice.
- TRACKNUMBER is used to designate the playback sequence number on this disc within a unique Album. DISCNUMBER is an optional ID3 tag (in it’s absence, 1 is assumed), but in combination with TRACKNUMBER, is the only way to be able to play all tracks in proper sequence with boxed-sets and multi-disc albums. Tesla does not use either tag for playback, and instead plays back (roughly) based on the alphanumeric sort of TRACKTITLE.
- Workaround is when building your USB device tracks, to use a tool which prefaces each TRACKTITLE on your USB device with both DISCNUMBER and TRACKNUMBER, e.g. “DD-TT track title” where DD is DISCNUMBER and TT is TRACKNUMBER. Just realize when you do this, your track names are going to show the prefaced additional information nearly everywhere in the UI.
- Tesla uses TRACKARTIST across the UI, which for purists, is exactly the right thing to do. The challenge is Tesla does not then also parse this tag content into individual artists when there are more than one specified in the track, as is common with compilation albums. As such, single ALBUMs on the USB device can appear split into multiples with the same Album Title in Tesla’s UI because of varying TRACKARTISTs within the same album.
- I appreciate the ID3 standard and an audiophile purist’s POV, however since this UI is for use in an automobile where it is necessary for designers to make trade-offs between providing functionality, while quickly and safely accessing what the driver needs to, using TRACKARTIST becomes unworkable for any owner with larger music libraries, especially if it contains a higher percentage of compilations.
- Workaround is when building your USB device tracks, to place the contents of ALBUMARTIST into TRACKARTIST in every track
- Suggestion to Tesla: Use ALBUMARTIST instead of TRACKARTIST across all of Media Player USB. If a track has no ALBUMARTIST tag, just like other media players, use the contents of TRACKARTIST in it's place. This has several side benefits:
- Tesla does not have to perform the more complex and time-consuming parsing otherwise needed upon USB device scan of TRACKARTIST to separate artists from one another. Processor resources are used for more important things and the Owner has access to their USB music faster.
- Compilations will more often than not be represented correctly within the UI, even if the user did not tag tracks correctly using PARTOFCOMPILATION
- Less (and likely a more useful) set of Artists are represented across the UI
- Far less of the fixed and limited CID memory is consumed with less valuable and even more infrequently used track artist data, allowing more real audio tracks to be made available in their place. While I cannot say this for absolute fact, I am convinced that previous reported problems with my USB Flash Drive with 6100 tracks that worked with 7.2 (15-20 mins scan time), and never got to a 80% complete scan in more than 2 hours once 8.0 was installed, is due to this exact issue. Deleting all TRACKARTIST data on a copy of the same stick allowed the scan process to complete in approx 6 minutes. ;)
- There is a problem with some jpg or png art that will not display in the Tesla UI, but displays successfully e.g. in iTunes, iOS Music Player, macOS Finder and Preview. Sampled failing art in the Tesla UI also fails loading into Photoshop CC 2015.5, but not other graphics tools I have access to such as Pixelmator. I’ve isolated this as far as I can to perhaps something related to Color Spaces or Art which does not have a “ColorSync Profile” whatever that may be.
- Workaround is when building your USB device tracks, to allow a media conversion tool to convert existing Art within the track, and pray the Tesla UI likes it better.
- Shifting between media types (e.g. Radio to USB), or playing back USB tracks from different albums (especially on random/shuffle) requires the driver to continuously adjust the volume level attempting to achieve a more consistent audio playback level
- Workaround is when building copies of your USB device tracks, to use a tool that can analyze and then apply physical volume leveling. While this isn’t what an audiophile may find acceptable with studio-quality ear-enclosed headphones, from a convenience perspective for me while driving my Tesla, this is a boon.
- Suggestion to Tesla #1: For years, other auto manufacturers such as Lexus and MBZ have had “ASL”, “Automatic Sound Leveling” or other software-only proprietary options within their media player to dynamically adjust CD/USB track playback volume to a more relative level. This is similar to what iTunes and iOS provide with the Sound Check option in each of it’s players. Tesla should implement a similar firmware-only Media Player option that can be turned on or off. I personally consider this a must-have, and a huge miss compared to the competition.
- Suggestion to Tesla #2: A more elegant and additional refinement to #1 for some future day, would be for Tesla to optionally allow use of ReplayGain tags when a track contains them. This standard was proposed in 2001, and the data is easily created by preprocessing tools such as dBpoweramp with its ReplayGain DSP that can analyze a track, then add/update the tags so subsequent playback is able to make use of the data on-the-fly.
(related to Bug 3)
- Songs View sort and playback based on alphanumeric TRACKTITLE sequence. Fine.
- Artists View also sorts based on alphanumeric TRACKARTIST sequence. OK (See Bug #4 above), but if you then select an artist name, secondary sort should probably be ALBUM (title)+ DISCNUMBER+TRACKNUMBER sequence.
- Albums View also sorts based on alphanumeric ALBUM (title) sequence. OK, but if you then select an album, secondary sort should probably be in DISCNUMBER+TRACKNUMBER sequence.
- Genre View also sorts based on alphanumeric GENRE sequence. OK, but then, if you select a genre, secondary sort should probably be something like ALBUM (title)+ALBUMARTIST+DISCNUMBER+TRACKNUMBER sequence.
- Suggestion to Tesla #1: There may be a pattern or some intention how your present secondary sorts within the UI work for Songs, Artists, Albums, Genre, but it’s not obvious to me. Putting this next layer of logic into the UI would serve owners well. My personal suggestion is just consider your internal track key to be ALBUM+ALBUMARTIST+DISCNUMBER+TRACKNUMBER and let that default sort work its way through the interface. To a large degree, that would provide both a unique key for every track on a USB device, and help with more consistent sorting of track data the way users expect. You need to display TRACKTITLE and make that available for selection most of the time, but the underlying sort order shouldn’t always be the same given how users think about their music collection.
- Suggestion to Tesla #2: Bring back the vertical alpha quick-selection method to access long lists in all USB views. With larger libraries, it’s nearly impossible to accurately scroll down a list of any length, but it’s now unsafe for the driver to take their eyes off the road for as long as it takes without this functionality.
- Workaround is to use Folder View where the user has a little more control over the order and drill-down of data based on their choices of folder names and their children.
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Notes — Oddities and Miscellaneous Observations
Note 1: USB Device Error Recovery Needs Improvements
- I’m up to 3 different USB Flash Drives (Patriot, PNY, & SanDisk) that fail in my MS, but show no evidence of an issue when accessed or diagnosed on my Mac, or when played back on a cheap USB Boom Box. Failures are anything from causing repeated reboots of the CID as long as the device is in the MS USB port, perhaps occasional unexpected CID reboots, to elongated times each time the CID is rebooted (likely waiting for a device timeout to occur).
- Tesla Service continues to recommend USB devices not be plugged in during start-up to avoid abnormal MCU operation. IMHO, this just isn’t a reasonable expectation, which seems to be unique to Tesla an no other vehicle I’ve owned.
- Perhaps when Tesla updates the underlying OS in December 2016, as Elon recently announced, this may improve.
Note 2: I Have Abandoned use of TeslaTunes (macOS only —
not a Tesla issue)
- I’m really appreciative having found this tool which served me well through 7.1, easily extracting tracks from my iTunes library and applying workarounds to make my USB Music experience tolerable in my MS. As noted upthread, a bug related to AIFF-FLAC migration of Album Art has been uncovered. That didn’t effect me personally, but I have found some other recent problems perhaps due to this aging App incompatibilities with the latest macOS Sierra 10.12, and honestly, TeslaTunes can’t deal with some of the newer workarounds I’m looking for with the new 8.0 UI.
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Bert’s 8.0 Workaround - October 22, 2016 (and yes, it will probably be a little different tomorrow, now that I’ve got the basics figured-out)
My objectives:
- Make no permanent changes my master iTunes audio/video library, composed primarily of M4A Lossy, M4A Lossless (Bug #2), and a few MP3 files, which have been meticulously tagged over the years
- Make use of the standard Tesla UI Songs, Artists, Albums, and Genre tabs, in additional to Folder, i.e. I don’t need to use USB Folder View exclusively to workaround most other annoyances or problems, allowing Folder View to become a 5th way to access tracks on my USB device.
- Be able to once again play a minimum of 6100 tracks with the Tesla 8.0 UI, as I could with 7.1
- Be able to play single and multi-disc albums in proper track sequence by DISCNUMBER and TRACKNUMBER (Bug #3)
- Reduce UI complexities associated with TRACKARTIST (and likely dramatically reduce limited on-board memory usage by excluding this not-as-important-in-a-car detail, using TRACKALBUM instead (Bug #4)
- Convert Album Art to JPG, perhaps allowing even more Album Art to display in my MS (Bug #5)
- Apply Automatic Volume Leveling to each track making USB playback levels approximately the same for all tracks, when compared against FM Radio sources (Suggestion #6)
- After selecting tracks from iTunes, automate as much of the conversion process as possible, resulting in copies of the source files as FLAC on a USB Flash Drive
…and yes, I am proud to say I have accomplished all that, and can repeat the process without too much effort. What I’m doing is likely more involved than many of you will want to take on, or even care about considering …but it makes me a lot happier being able to listen to and access my music, pretty much my way in my Model S once again.
I now have a USB Flash Drive with 6125 tracks that completes an initial MS scan in a record 6 minutes (15-20 mins with 7.1), where I can both see and play tracks from any of my albums (including multi-disc) in proper sequence. I now see only the primary artists associated with each of my tracks and albums across Tesla’s UI, making scrolling and quick selection a lot simpler in several of the views. I’ve not yet found a track where my Album Art isn’t displaying properly, and perhaps more exciting to me… when I switch between FM to my music on USB and back, or listen to my fairly diverse USB tracks on random/shuffle, the relative volume remains about the same and I’m no longer fiddling with the steering wheel volume control as much as I have always had to do in my Tesla.
The disadvantages are it took a lot of time to figure out more precisely what the common bugs are, then how to workaround what was most important to me. Honestly, I never had to do anything like this in my former Lexus, MBZ or BMW. The process is not as easy or fast as what TeslaTunes use to provide me with essentially point-and-click against my iTunes library, and it built and maintained my USB stick for me from there on out. I do have this new procedure down to two major steps, with the most complex and longest part completely automated -- doing far more than I thought possible and frankly surpassing what I was able to do with TeslaTunes. Still, with my fairly high-end quad core 4GHz i7 iMac, it took more than 14.5 hours of dedicated hands-off time to move 6125 tracks through Step 2 of the conversion. I still have a few anomolies with the UI. Beyond missing the vertical alpha quick selection method, most notably, I’m now staring at DD-TT in front of every track title throughout the interface, but I’ll take that so I can see and play my tracks in correct album sequence whenever I want to. ...but overall, I've made some great tradeoffs for what bothered me most, and am pretty happy considering I still have to manage a workaround.
A Summary of My Current Workaround Process, & the Tools I Use
- Extract files from iTunes that I want to listen to in my MS into a temporary subdirectory on my iMac SSD (it’s faster than USB and I have the work space)
- I either drag & drop copies of tracks directly from iTunes to the temporary location, or
- on my Mac, I use a tool called Export for iTunes ($7.99 on the macOS Store, and no, I have no affiliation with it) that gives me point-n-click access to my iTunes Playlists and Albums, and it does the extraction for me while I off doing something more important. (To keep things straight, I do not let it do any conversion that it is capable of on it's own.)
- Use dBpoweramp Music Converter for the complex automation and actual building of my USB device
- No, it’s not free. dBpoweramp is $39 for macOS and Windows. My experience is with the Mac version that comes with two forms of conversion as well as a sophisticated CD Ripper.
- Note: I have no connection to dBpoweramp, and don’t receive some sort of kickback from them …but, here’s a public thank you to @Boatguy for turning me onto the toolset months ago — it’s come in handy for a lot more than just re-ripping a few of my old CDs into lossless format.
- dBpoweramp Batch Converter then:
- let’s me point it at that temporary directory containing the source files I want to have converted for use in my MS
- performs Volume Normalize analysis against each track, in an adaptive manner looking across in my case 6000ms windows of time to determine what to move up and down within the track without clipping. This is a very compute intensive process, hence why it takes an exponential amount of time to do the whole conversion.
- puts the contents of ALBUMARTIST into TRACKARTIST on every track
- changes all Album Art to JPEG. I could have it also reduce size to perhaps save a little compute time inside my MS — I just have not gone that far into my exploration YET.
- changes TRACKTITLE to “DISCNUMBER-TRACKNUMBER TRACKTITLE” on every track
- converts every source file of varying encoding types to FLAC. Lossless remains lossless; Lossy does not get better or worse.
- places the files once they are processed onto the USB device in whatever folder structure I desire for use in the Tesla’s Folder View (I’m presently using ALBUMARTIST/ALBUM/DISCNUMBER-TRACK-NUMBER TITLE, but that will certainly evolve over time.)
I hope that helps someone, even if some little detail is off. Maybe I’m done with this Sherlock Holmes episode at last!
