Comprehensive USB Bug List

[BertL]

Thanks for the detailed post.
On my new X I have two USB sticks. The 256Gb one with 5200 tracks never finishes loading ( I was on a recent road trip and it didn't load in the time between supercharger stops!). A small stick with 250 songs did load quickly and was remembered between stops.
Did you do anything special to get your 6100 songs to load? Any idea why yours loads quickly and mine never finishes?
Also, I use dbpoweramp, do you have a script for the changes you would be willing to share? I use replaygain, but would be willing to apply the volume changes directly, to avoid at least that issue. Same for embedded art, which does not always work.
On 2.40.21 the search at least works correctly for me.

• I've never tried two USB devices at once, so do not know what complexities that creates or not, especially since Tesla has never documented their intent.
• As I suggest in the long post above, I suspect the issue with with my 6100 stick that worked fine with 7.1, and never completed loading with 8.0 was somehow related to memory constraints. Tag data that shows up in the interface has to go somewhere as it's scanned, and like predecessor releases, things seem to slow to a crawl as internal memory limits are perhaps reached. It does not appear Tesla has done much to set actual upper limits or just stop and notify the user when it's out of resources. Anyway, I won't try to defend it to anyone here (plenty of people that live to take exception with others on this forum), but given I took my source 6100 stick that worked with 7.2 and not 8.0, and stripped out TRACKARTIST tag data on all tracks with everything else being the same, and it then worked in 8.0, I believe that is sufficient to prove the point at least to myself. SO, my solution as you asked for, is to put ALBUMARTIST in where TRACKARTIST is on all tracks... since I have lots of Broadway, Compilations, etc, that likely reduces memory usage considerably, and again, IMHO allows the tracks to load. Try it. That's easy with dBpoweramp.
• Sorry, in terms of documenting more detail on setup, perhaps some day. I've now put somewhere in excess of 30 hours trying to understand, document back to TMC, and build workarounds with this nutty 8.0, and am honestly tired of it now. Jury Duty begins Monday, so it's low in my list to get more detailed than I already have tried to be. Sorry. Look at the last part of my post. All the detail is there pretty much in the order it's accessible and modifiable in dBpoweramp. Its just which buttons to push and where to put those options that you'll have to explore a bit.
• My understanding of ReplayGain is perhaps different than yours. Depending upon what you have selected, you either are or are not getting benefits with Tesla's Media Player that has no knowledge of those tags today. Take a look at the dBpoweramp Volume Normalization DSP instead and use adaptive like I suggested above. It takes time, but will rewrite your physical track copies so the volume is more consistent. I'd never do that to my source library, but on a copy for use only in my Tesla, sure.
• Art has issues, again as mentioned above and in my former posts in this and the primary 8.0 thread. In dBPoweramp, turn on the force JPEG option as I suggest above. That helped me get over another hurdle with some that were not appearing. Still unsure if it was a 100% workaround as I have not inspected 6K+ tracks individually sitting in my MS, but several specific examples I had noted to myself as failing before, now are appearing.
• Glad to hear about search... my Tesla isn't as good understanding me as Siri by a long shot, so I'm not sure it will be of high value to me. I'd rather have more of the basic bugs and organizational issues resolved in the interface than anything if I had anything to say about their priorities.

Good luck!

 

[RichardL]

Thanks, no problem
I use the old 'slimserver' , Logitech transporter system in my house, so every track has art and replaygain to normalize volume. Many of my track are 24 x 196k FLACs ( pretty all FLAC), so my best outcome would be to simply use the same files on the car. This was how it worked in the S, before 8.0. Now I have the X and 8.0, so I need to fix this to be useable.

Since my houseguests just Left (and they loved the X), I will now try to get a working setup, and provide any worthwhile feedback I can

 

[BertL]

@BertL, or anyone else that knows...

1) So the consensus seems to be that the best way to arrange your folders for searching would be one of these?
a) Music > Alpha > Artist > Album
b) Music > Alpha > Artist - Album

...

You're last on my to-do list. Sorry it took a while. My much longer post above hopefully addressed your #2, albeit in a round-about way. Folder structure alone isn't going to help address deficiencies in Media Player not playing tracks in proper DISCNUMBER+TRACKNUMBER sequence. Be that as it may, let me try with some thoughts on Folder Structure. There are unlimited possibilities, so anything I say can be improved, changed or ignored... For this purpose, I'm going to assume you are not using the standard Songs, Albums, Artists, Genre views because of other problems you are encountering. OK.

The primary question to ask yourself is: How do I prefer to generally access my music? Some examples:

• By Album? Then subdirectories by ALBUM (title) would make sense. I'd propose that really be "ALBUM - ALBUMARTIST", because if you automate the process and e.g. have multiple albums titled "Greatest Hits" you'll get multiple tracks from each of those Greatest Hits albums placed in the same directory.
• By Artist? Assuming you populate it in your library, PLEASE use ALBUMARTIST and not TRACKARTIST as your subdirectory names. IMHO TRACKARTIST is just too messy if you have any number of compilations or tracks with guest artists. You likely won't appreciate what your directory structure will look like if you use automation and then try to search with TRACKARTIST.
• By Genre? Easy. Subdirectories by GENRE.
• By Playlist? A little more complicated if you care about the detail, but just create a subdirectory named the same as each Playlist you have, and populate each one with the tracks that are a part of each. Now the caveats:
  • If you always play tracks in each Playlist on random/shuffle or you don't care about their order, you're golden. If you want the tracks to playback in some sequential order you prefer, you must preface each TRACKTITLE with a number representing it's position in the playlist (no, it's not TRACKNUMBER) so the interface will play them in sequence.
  • If you have tracks in your master library that are referenced in multiple playlists, understand you may end up with multiple copies of the same track on your USB Flash Drive in different playlist subdirectories. That is absolutely fine as long as you stay in Media Player Folder View. If OTOH you go to the standard Songs, Albums, Artists, Genre views to access music, you will see multiple copies -- that isn't a Tesla issue -- they just don't attempt to figure out and manage physical duplicates you may put on your stick.
• There is of course nothing stopping you from mixing those up, combining them, or whatever you want to do. It's your choice. Just heed my warning above about duplicates if you go outside of Folder View.
• If you have only a couple handfuls of tracks, well, it's really not a big deal. Don't worry with all this subdirectory complexity. Put them on the stick and go.

General Considerations

• Special Characters were problematic in 7.1 Media Player in both directory/filenames and in tag data. We know we have at least a partial problem in that regard with 8.0 Volume Names not dealing with imbedded blanks well, so who knows everywhere else. My suggestion? KISS. A-Z, a-z, 0-9, commas, apostrophes, parens and brackets -- perhaps others too. I'll let someone else test all the valid possibilities.
• Media Player 8.0 is still doing what I call a "Rescan" of a USB device when it's inserted and when your MS wakes up from sleep (that's a Big Fat BUG as discussed elsewhere)... It appears to me, Tesla finds the same directory structure and filenames on a USB device that were already initially Scanned and in it's cache, it attempts to save time by not opening the physical files themselves. That's GREAT unless what you did was remove your USB device, change tag data in some files, and put that same device back into your MS. In that case, it's likely the Media Player interface will continue to operate as if no tag changes were made. You have two workarounds:
  • Reboot your CID each time you make changes to a USB device, which seems to generally force an initial Scan of the USB device, or
  • Change the directory name above where your changed files reside. What I do is: Format my USB device; Place a single subdirectory in the root called YYYY-MM-DD, and place all other subdirectories below that. Then, when I change the contents on the stick, I just rename that single directory name, which forces Media Player to do an initial Scan on everything beneath it.
• With the absence of the vertical alpha quick selection method in 8.0, if scrolling is as problematic for you as it is for me, consider creating your directory/subdirectory structure such that there are only 16-24 (or so) things in each directory. The interface presents 8-10 items at a time, and with a quick vertical scroll, you'll generally see 8 new ones at a time. More than 1 or two swipes becomes problematic for me, hence my recommendation. YMMV.
• Tesla does not (yet) document a maximum directory depth, but if I were you I'd not make any directory structure on my USB device more than 6 deep. My former BMW allows 6 max; my former Lexus was 8. You may be able to go deeper today. Great. I'd just future-proof my design if I were you.
• We could debate forever since we don't have access to Tesla's design, but generally, the more directories you create which contain tracks, and the longer text length each of them are, it will consume more memory in the fixed amount available with the CID. Is that a big deal? Likely not for people with smaller libraries. For people with larger ones (like me), keeping your directory structure as flat as possible, while still accomplishing what you're trying to do organizationally, is the best way to go.

How is My USB Flash Drive Set Up?

• Formatted as FAT32; Volume Label: TESLA4plus
• I create a single directory in the root called /2016-10-23
• I begin using a Smart Playlist that extracts 4 or 5-star rated non-holiday (genre) tracks from my iTunes library, then add to that full albums for a handful I'm interested in at a time. In those 6K tracks, there are roughly 1K albums. I transform and convert those tracks as described earlier using dBpoweramp, with each track being placed by the conversion tool into a temporary subdirectory named "ALBUM - ALBUMARTIST"
• Safely scrolling with 8.0 is a big issue to me, so I then build subdirectories named /#-9, /A-C, /D-G ... -Z as children to /2016-10-23 on the USB Flash Drive. I just move those "Album-Artist" subdirectories into the right ones. I'm just 3-levels deep directory structure-wise, so no problems. Folder View then gets me a short list of alphabetic selections, then albums in each one, and from there I select one and see a list of albums that is more easily scrolled to find what I'm after.
  • Note: Since my other workarounds allow me to use the other Tesla Views, I will bag this whole #-9, A-C blah-blah-blah thing once Tesla fixes the scrolling problems. My ALBUM-ALBUMARTIST directories will just be children under the single date one in the root, allowing me full automation of the process once again.
• If I add or change files in the future, I do it, then change the root directory name from 2016-10-23 to today's date. It's the routine, so not a big deal for me, and when I reinsert my stick a full Scan is done so any tag changes I may have made are updated within the interface.

Hope that helps.

 

[STbreaker]

You're last on my to-do list. Sorry it took a while. My much longer post above hopefully addressed your #2, albeit in a round-about way. Folder structure alone isn't going to help address deficiencies in Media Player not playing tracks in proper DISCNUMBER+TRACKNUMBER sequence. Be that as it may, let me try with some thoughts on Folder Structure. There are unlimited possibilities, so anything I say can be improved, changed or ignored... For this purpose, I'm going to assume you are not using the standard Songs, Albums, Artists, Genre views because of other problems you are encountering. OK.

The primary question to ask yourself is: How do I prefer to generally access my music? Some examples:

• By Album? Then subdirectories by ALBUM (title) would make sense. I'd propose that really be "ALBUM - ALBUMARTIST", because if you automate the process and e.g. have multiple albums titled "Greatest Hits" you'll get multiple tracks from each of those Greatest Hits albums placed in the same directory.
• By Artist? Assuming you populate it in your library, PLEASE use ALBUMARTIST and not TRACKARTIST as your subdirectory names. IMHO TRACKARTIST is just too messy if you have any number of compilations or tracks with guest artists. You likely won't appreciate what your directory structure will look like if you use automation and then try to search with TRACKARTIST.
• By Genre? Easy. Subdirectories by GENRE.
• By Playlist? A little more complicated if you care about the detail, but just create a subdirectory named the same as each Playlist you have, and populate each one with the tracks that are a part of each. Now the caveats:
  • If you always play tracks in each Playlist on random/shuffle or you don't care about their order, you're golden. If you want the tracks to playback in some sequential order you prefer, you must preface each TRACKTITLE with a number representing it's position in the playlist (no, it's not TRACKNUMBER) so the interface will play them in sequence.
  • If you have tracks in your master library that are referenced in multiple playlists, understand you may end up with multiple copies of the same track on your USB Flash Drive in different playlist subdirectories. That is absolutely fine as long as you stay in Media Player Folder View. If OTOH you go to the standard Songs, Albums, Artists, Genre views to access music, you will see multiple copies -- that isn't a Tesla issue -- they just don't attempt to figure out and manage physical duplicates you may put on your stick.
• There is of course nothing stopping you from mixing those up, combining them, or whatever you want to do. It's your choice. Just heed my warning above about duplicates if you go outside of Folder View.
• If you have only a couple handfuls of tracks, well, it's really not a big deal. Don't worry with all this subdirectory complexity. Put them on the stick and go.

General Considerations

• Special Characters were problematic in 7.1 Media Player in both directory/filenames and in tag data. We know we have at least a partial problem in that regard with 8.0 Volume Names not dealing with imbedded blanks well, so who knows everywhere else. My suggestion? KISS. A-Z, a-z, 0-9, commas, apostrophes, parens and brackets -- perhaps others too. I'll let someone else test all the valid possibilities.
• Media Player 8.0 is still doing what I call a "Rescan" of a USB device when it's inserted and when your MS wakes up from sleep (that's a Big Fat BUG as discussed elsewhere)... It appears to me, Tesla finds the same directory structure and filenames on a USB device that were already initially Scanned and in it's cache, it attempts to save time by not opening the physical files themselves. That's GREAT unless what you did was remove your USB device, change tag data in some files, and put that same device back into your MS. In that case, it's likely the Media Player interface will continue to operate as if no tag changes were made. You have two workarounds:
  • Reboot your CID each time you make changes to a USB device, which seems to generally force an initial Scan of the USB device, or
  • Change the directory name above where your changed files reside. What I do is: Format my USB device; Place a single subdirectory in the root called YYYY-MM-DD, and place all other subdirectories below that. Then, when I change the contents on the stick, I just rename that single directory name, which forces Media Player to do an initial Scan on everything beneath it.
• With the absence of the vertical alpha quick selection method in 8.0, if scrolling is as problematic for you as it is for me, consider creating your directory/subdirectory structure such that there are only 16-24 (or so) things in each directory. The interface presents 8-10 items at a time, and with a quick vertical scroll, you'll generally see 8 new ones at a time. More than 1 or two swipes becomes problematic for me, hence my recommendation. YMMV.
• Tesla does not (yet) document a maximum directory depth, but if I were you I'd not make any directory structure on my USB device more than 6 deep. My former BMW allows 6 max; my former Lexus was 8. You may be able to go deeper today. Great. I'd just future-proof my design if I were you.
• We could debate forever since we don't have access to Tesla's design, but generally, the more directories you create which contain tracks, and the longer text length each of them are, it will consume more memory in the fixed amount available with the CID. Is that a big deal? Likely not for people with smaller libraries. For people with larger ones (like me), keeping your directory structure as flat as possible, while still accomplishing what you're trying to do organizationally, is the best way to go.

How is My USB Flash Drive Set Up?

• Formatted as FAT32; Volume Label: TESLA4plus
• I create a single directory in the root called /2016-10-23
• I begin using a Smart Playlist that extracts 4 or 5-star rated non-holiday (genre) tracks from my iTunes library, then add to that full albums for a handful I'm interested in at a time. In those 6K tracks, there are roughly 1K albums. I transform and convert those tracks as described earlier using dBpoweramp, with each track being placed by the conversion tool into a temporary subdirectory named "ALBUM - ALBUMARTIST"
• Safely scrolling with 8.0 is a big issue to me, so I then build subdirectories named /#-9, /A-C, /D-G ... -Z as children to /2016-10-23 on the USB Flash Drive. I just move those "Album-Artist" subdirectories into the right ones. I'm just 3-levels deep directory structure-wise, so no problems. Folder View then gets me a short list of alphabetic selections, then albums in each one, and from there I select one and see a list of albums that is more easily scrolled to find what I'm after.
  • Note: Since my other workarounds allow me to use the other Tesla Views, I will bag this whole #-9, A-C blah-blah-blah thing once Tesla fixes the scrolling problems. My ALBUM-ALBUMARTIST directories will just be children under the single date one in the root, allowing me full automation of the process once again.
• If I add or change files in the future, I do it, then change the root directory name from 2016-10-23 to today's date. It's the routine, so not a big deal for me, and when I reinsert my stick a full Scan is done so any tag changes I may have made are updated within the interface.

Hope that helps.

Thanks so much for all the work that you have done. People like you are what makes this forum worth being on. Obviously, you have no obligation to figure all this stuff out and share it with us to save us time/frustration. (And I'm neurotic enough that once I had some time to get started, I probably would've tried a whole bunch of things like you did and driven my wife crazy in the process).

Between your two mega posts, I'll definitely give those things a try. I figured I would post my habits just as a data point for you. Maybe it will help you think about things if find yourself running into other problems:

Arrangement
My iTunes library is meticulously arranged because I was always really annoyed at the duplicates created by the TRACKARTIST tag. So what I would do (and still do now) is to set the TRACKARTIST and ALBUMARTIST tags to the actual album artist and then I would cut and paste any featured artist into TRACKTITLE. As ALBUMARTIST was not an available tag when I first started using iTunes, it is blank in a good portion of my library actually. For compilations, I basically decide who is the parent of the compilation and I then set both artist tags to that person and include the track artist as part of the TRACKTITLE.
Classical music is an entire other problem, so I decided not to include that on my USB stick. Again just as a data point, I set both the COMPOSER and TRACKARTIST to the composer's name, and set ALBUMARTIST to the performer. Then I take all the tracks in a specific piece and set their GROUPING to the piece name. That way when I'm at home working/studying, I can use itunes to shuffle entire pieces without making playlists.
So as you can see, I'm actually borderline obsessive about the cleanliness of my library and its tags. I never thought I would be a person to have problems with any interface because of how much work I put in on the front end. Somehow Tesla managed to set up a system that is so broken, it still managed to mess me up.

Usage
Once again as a data point: when I'm at home, I use shuffle all the time. I have 3-4 different smart playlists that I use depending on what I'm doing and what mood I'm in. For instance, I have a "study" playlist which only plays music I find unintrusive (e.g. classical, soundtrack, etc). I only bring that up to highlight that my GENRE tags are very tight as I use it as the primary parameter to create the smart playlists. Again, I went through and merged similar ones into one homogenous name.
In the car, I'm totally different. I only deal in albums, in track order. I have about 800 albums by 350 artists, so in order to force myself to listen to different stuff, I will alphabetically work my way down the stick by artist. So for 'A,' I would decide I wanted to listen to 'Atmosphere' and then pick an album by them. Then for 'B' it might be 'Burial' and then I would choose an album. I continue to move forward in the alphabet choosing the artist I want, and then the album I want.
This practice of course was great in 7.1 because the nested tree structure (given my strict tagging) allowed me to easily browse through my music to choose my next album, even while driving. Honestly, this is the same thing I did when I was using my iPod in the car (though I would always 'queue up' the next album while stopped by browsing into the artist > album directory and not actually playing it - essentially exploiting that quirk as a'hot playlist' and a safety work around). Naturally, I was annoyed/appalled at the 8.0 update because it basically made this behavior I've been doing for years impossible. As someone mentioned, the burden of metadata is now on me, which is impossible for a library this size. Right now what I would have to do is:
1) use the artist view to scroll to the artist, try to remember a track on the album I want by scrolling , and select it so I can get the actual album name.
2) Then I would have to go into "albums" and scroll down to the one I want (I can't use the search function on the USB drive, though apparently some of you can?) and select if from there to get it to play in track order.

For those reading along, you may be wondering why I don't just choose the album I want in the artist view, since it does seem to sort the tracks by album in spite of just having all tracks by the artist in one massive list. As I mentioned prior, I have to do it this way so that I can quickly switch back to the album I was playing after I change sources. Maybe this would be a moot point if it actually remembered the track I was on when I switch back instead of going to the beginning of the selection (I miss you scroll wheel media source option ). So for my 120+ tracks by Atmosphere, you can imagine how annoying it would be to try to get back to track 60 of that list to continue listening to the album I want.

 

[BertL]

Thanks so much for all the work that you have done. People like you are what makes this forum worth being on. Obviously, you have no obligation to figure all this stuff out and share it with us to save us time/frustration. (And I'm neurotic enough that once I had some time to get started, I probably would've tried a whole bunch of things like you did and driven my wife crazy in the process).

Between your two mega posts, I'll definitely give those things a try. I figured I would post my habits just as a data point for you. Maybe it will help you think about things if find yourself running into other problems:

Arrangement
My iTunes library is meticulously arranged because I was always really annoyed at the duplicates created by the TRACKARTIST tag. So what I would do (and still do now) is to set the TRACKARTIST and ALBUMARTIST tags to the actual album artist and then I would cut and paste any featured artist into TRACKTITLE. As ALBUMARTIST was not an available tag when I first started using iTunes, it is blank in a good portion of my library actually. For compilations, I basically decide who is the parent of the compilation and I then set both artist tags to that person and include the track artist as part of the TRACKTITLE.
Classical music is an entire other problem, so I decided not to include that on my USB stick. Again just as a data point, I set both the COMPOSER and TRACKARTIST to the composer's name, and set ALBUMARTIST to the performer. Then I take all the tracks in a specific piece and set their GROUPING to the piece name. That way when I'm at home working/studying, I can use itunes to shuffle entire pieces without making playlists.
So as you can see, I'm actually borderline obsessive about the cleanliness of my library and its tags. I never thought I would be a person to have problems with any interface because of how much work I put in on the front end. Somehow Tesla managed to set up a system that is so broken, it still managed to mess me up.

Usage
Once again as a data point: when I'm at home, I use shuffle all the time. I have 3-4 different smart playlists that I use depending on what I'm doing and what mood I'm in. For instance, I have a "study" playlist which only plays music I find unintrusive (e.g. classical, soundtrack, etc). I only bring that up to highlight that my GENRE tags are very tight as I use it as the primary parameter to create the smart playlists. Again, I went through and merged similar ones into one homogenous name.
In the car, I'm totally different. I only deal in albums, in track order. I have about 800 albums by 350 artists, so in order to force myself to listen to different stuff, I will alphabetically work my way down the stick by artist. So for 'A,' I would decide I wanted to listen to 'Atmosphere' and then pick an album by them. Then for 'B' it might be 'Burial' and then I would choose an album. I continue to move forward in the alphabet choosing the artist I want, and then the album I want.
This practice of course was great in 7.1 because the nested tree structure (given my strict tagging) allowed me to easily browse through my music to choose my next album, even while driving. Honestly, this is the same thing I did when I was using my iPod in the car (though I would always 'queue up' the next album while stopped by browsing into the artist > album directory and not actually playing it - essentially exploiting that quirk as a'hot playlist' and a safety work around). Naturally, I was annoyed/appalled at the 8.0 update because it basically made this behavior I've been doing for years impossible. As someone mentioned, the burden of metadata is now on me, which is impossible for a library this size. Right now what I would have to do is:
1) use the artist view to pick the artist, try to remember a track on the album I want, and select it so I can get the actual album name.
2) Then I would have to go into "albums" and scroll down to the one I want (I can't use the search function on the USB drive, though apparently some of you can?) and select if from there to get it to play in track order.

For those reading along, you may be wondering why I don't just choose the album I want in the artist view, since it does seem to sort the tracks by album in spite of just having all tracks by the artist in one massive list. As I mentioned prior, I have to do it this way so that I can quickly switch back to the album I was playing after I change sources. Maybe this would be a moot point if it actually remembered the track I was on when I switch back instead of going to the beginning of the selection (I miss you scroll wheel media source option ). So for my 120+ tracks by Atmosphere, you can imagine how annoying it would be to try to get back to track 60 of that list to continue listening to the album I want.

Ah Ha Ha. Another detail freak like myself. Happy to meet your acquaintance. Let me just say, I've never gotten heavily into Classical, and with the ID3 Tagging challenges assostiated with that type of music, let alone a huge majority of players not abiding by it all, well, I would be going even more nuts deciding what to do.

...thx for your feedback, and enjoyed reading how you are using all this music stuff. (BTW, I suspect you're gonna love my next post here in a few moments. I'm sure it will drive others mad.)

 

[BertL]

Optimum Album Art size for use with Media Player 8.0

As discussed in my all-too-long earlier post, I've embarked upon converting much of my existing Album Art with other workarounds I desire with Media Player 8.0. The conversion tool I'm using allows existing imbedded album art to be converted to jpg as well as be resized during the rest of the transformation process. Since some of my art is in excess of 1800x1800, even with compression, thats a lot more bits being stored on my USB stick, and then moving from USB to the MCU/CID just to be thrown away, when there is no way the CID will ever display something that large. Is it a nit? Likely, but we also know the CID can slow down, so why not help it in some little way?

The net is, with the existing 17" CID in our MS being approx 130 DPI, and that Media Player 8.0 displays its largest Album Art image just under 2.25"x2.25", if the image inside your track is larger than roughly 300x300, it will be scaled back down anyway. So, I have dBpoweramp re-crunching my source files, reducing all of my Album Art to 300x300 JPEG along with the rest of what it's doing to create my USB Stick. Why not keep my Mac happy doing something productive!

 

[iffatall]

I received .21 yesterday, and I have to say, using the media player to play USB content is far better now. Granted I have not tested it enough yet, but I'd go so far as to say the media player is not unusable anymore.

• I have over 700 albums, and scrolling from A to Z on the album view now only takes less than 2 mins for me. I have to do a lot of swipes, and it stutters, but as I said, it only takes a couple of minutes.
• Moreover, if I accidentally enter an album when scrolling, going back takes me to the exact same position in the album list - not to the top.
• Once I finish this 2 min scroll, scrolling up and down afterwards is far smoother (although still stutters a little).
• And of course, the search function now includes USB.

Within the album, songs are still not listed per track #, but we have a workaround for that. These, added to the correct artwork displaying now, for me, the player is better than that in 7.1. Certainly not unusable.

Alpha shortcuts are still much needed, and I'd prefer Album list show the Album Artist tag rather than the list of the Artist tags of all the songs within. Also, I'd much like the scrolling and browsing to be faster.

I have been very critical of 8.0 for the media player thus far, and now I take most of my critique back.

 

[X Fan]

Which version of 8.0 do you have? Since I think the USB searching was added in 2.40.21. (2.36.108 doesn't have USB search.)

Yes, I can search with 40.21. However, I have found that the search result selecting album is limited to 8 results.

For instance, I changed all my album names using tag editor adding two letters (first/last name) as a preface to album name. Have a boatload of Sinatra albums starting with "FS" but only got 8 results.

 

[X Fan]

Question:

Upon loading, Tesla shows 461GB for my 2,900 song list. On my Mac, it's 89.1GB.

Inaccurate or is Tesla introducing a lot of inefficiency?

Thanks

 

[BertL]

Question:

Upon loading, Tesla shows 461GB for my 2,900 song list. On my Mac, it's 89.1GB.

Inaccurate or is Tesla introducing a lot of inefficiency?

Thanks

Yes, I've noticed the calculation is off as well, but then I many times have my other USB Port with only a lightning connector (and no device) displaying EFI as its volume name with 200MB. Like you, I tried to figure out what the calculation may be, but instead moved on to bigger problems first.

 

[tomas]

Question:

Upon loading, Tesla shows 461GB for my 2,900 song list. On my Mac, it's 89.1GB.

Inaccurate or is Tesla introducing a lot of inefficiency?

Thanks

It shows the size of the drive, not the contents. That is drive capacity.

 

[X Fan]

Yes, I've noticed the calculation is off as well, but then I many times have my other USB Port with only a lightning connector (and no device) displaying EFI as its volume name with 200MB. Like you, I tried to figure out what the calculation may be, but instead moved on to bigger problems first.

haha...since my drive is fixed and everything now plays properly, I'm working my way down to minutia.....still wish Tesla query gave more than 8 results though....

 

[Boatguy]

Bert’s Media Player 8.0 2.38.19 Observations & Workarounds V2

Excellent and thorough post, but I need a little clarification.

Am I correct that you've abandoned playlists for now?

What/how are you using the v8 folders?

 

[MP3Mike]

Am I correct that you've abandoned playlists for now?

How can he "abandon" playlists; Tesla has never supported them.

 

[BertL]

Excellent and thorough post, but I need a little clarification.

Am I correct that you've abandoned playlists for now?

What/how are you using the v8 folders?

Yes, playlists in my Tesla are gone since coming to my Tesla. I have maybe 50 or so I use in iTunes and on my iOS devices, but honestly use my "best of everything" (aka 4-star+ non-holiday) on random with my iPhone when I'm out walking every day, except when that becomes "best of Christmas" for that month of the year.

In the past, I got too frustrated with duplicate tracks when I simulated real playlists in my Tesla trying to use anything other than folder view, so, now, I extract my 4-star+ non-holiday tracks, then add a handful of more complete albums to what I ultimately have on my USB Stick. Those get processed as previously described. WIth the workarounds that accomplishes, I can play full or just my favorite tracks of any album in sequence or randomly; I can also randomly play all tracks by any album artist or genre (which is more of what I tend to switch to on-the-fly while driving). That gives me pretty good diversity using the standard interface.

Of note, since I've been so meticulous with tagging TRACKARTIST and I have so many compilations, the standard Tesla interface is unusable with more than a thousand of what it treats like unique artists. (Tesla isn't parsing TRACKARTIST into the individual artists, so strings of multiples all appear as unique in their interface.). With my putting ALBUMARTIST into TRACKARTIST, I'm down to roughly 100 artists the way Tesla presents this now, which is more usable and scrollable, even if it's not exactly perfect. Honestly, quick access and usability in my automobile are more important than precision of data like I expect in my source library.​

While I've only lived with it for less than a week, I'm just not using Folder View very often because I can successfully use the standard views -- albeit scrolling longer lists can be problematic. I do have my folder structure right now set up by a few folders like A-C, D-E, ...Z, just to help with quicker access as a sort of replacement for the vertical alpha selection we used to have, and inside each of those are the subset of ALBUM-ALBUMARTIST folders that contain their tracks. Honestly though, I am considering bagging that extra step as I am not using it very often for the manual work it requires. I think instead when an do my next run of dBpowramp with my 6100 tracks, I'm going to just put all my tracks under a single root directory in that same ALBUM-ALBUMARTIST structure and leave it at that. dBpoweramp can handle that build directly and I won't have to then split and move the albums into those little short-cut alpha folders. I'm just not using them that often. Sure, it's a decent workaround, but I've got to believe Tesla will ultimately give us that shortcut method back, and Ali can live with the other ways to get to my music until then.

So, net is: Volume / 2016-10-24 / the series of alpha split folders / ALBUM-ALBUMARTIST / tracks​

Hope that explains. Sitting in the Jury Duty Room, and it's a lot harder doing this two-finger typing than with my real keyboard and a bigger screen.

 

[Boatguy]

Yes, playlists in my Tesla are gone since coming to my Tesla. I have maybe 50 or so I use in iTunes and on my iOS devices, but honestly use my "best of everything" (aka 4-star+ non-holiday) on random with my iPhone when I'm out walking every day, except when that becomes "best of Christmas" for that month of the year.

In the past, I got too frustrated with duplicate tracks when I simulated real playlists in my Tesla trying to use anything other than folder view, so, now, I extract my 4-star+ non-holiday tracks, then add a handful of more complete albums to what I ultimately have on my USB Stick. Those get processed as previously described. WIth the workarounds that accomplishes, I can play full or just my favorite tracks of any album in sequence or randomly; I can also randomly play all tracks by any album artist or genre (which is more of what I tend to switch to on-the-fly while driving). That gives me pretty good diversity using the standard interface.

Of note, since I've been so meticulous with tagging TRACKARTIST and I have so many compilations, the standard Tesla interface is unusable with more than a thousand of what it treats like unique artists. (Tesla isn't parsing TRACKARTIST into the individual artists, so strings of multiples all appear as unique in their interface.). With my putting ALBUMARTIST into TRACKARTIST, I'm down to roughly 100 artists the way Tesla presents this now, which is more usable and scrollable, even if it's not exactly perfect. Honestly, quick access and usability in my automobile are more important than precision of data like I expect in my source library.​

While I've only lived with it for less than a week, I'm just not using Folder View very often because I can successfully use the standard views -- albeit scrolling longer lists can be problematic. I do have my folder structure right now set up by a few folders like A-C, D-E, ...Z, just to help with quicker access as a sort of replacement for the vertical alpha selection we used to have, and inside each of those are the subset of ALBUM-ALBUMARTIST folders that contain their tracks. Honestly though, I am considering bagging that extra step as I am not using it very often for the manual work it requires. I think instead when an do my next run of dBpowramp with my 6100 tracks, I'm going to just put all my tracks under a single root directory in that same ALBUM-ALBUMARTIST structure and leave it at that. dBpoweramp can handle that build directly and I won't have to then split and move the albums into those little short-cut alpha folders. I'm just not using them that often. Sure, it's a decent workaround, but I've got to believe Tesla will ultimately give us that shortcut method back, and Ali can live with the other ways to get to my music until then.

So, net is: Volume / 2016-10-24 / the series of alpha split folders / ALBUM-ALBUMARTIST / tracks​

Hope that explains. Sitting in the Jury Duty Room, and it's a lot harder doing this two-finger typing than with my real keyboard and a bigger screen.

Got it! I'm going to fire up dbPowerAmp (no affiliation) and give it a try. Thanks for the detailed work and reporting.

 

[Boatguy]

How can he "abandon" playlists; Tesla has never supported them.

Of course, but there were various attempts to implement them none the less, most notably Tesla Tunes.

 

[CuriousG]

haha...since my drive is fixed and everything now plays properly, I'm working my way down to minutia.....still wish Tesla query gave more than 8 results though....

Well don't put 746 Frank Sinatra songs on there.

 

[X Fan]

Well don't put 746 Frank Sinatra songs on there.

Funny...don't forget my +8 Bennett, Nat King Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, Bruce & Eagles albums that don't query well. Well at least my Sir Goossens & Three Tenors are easily found

 

[X Fan]

Post#341 from BertL:

• I've never tried two USB devices at once, so do not know what complexities that creates or not, especially since Tesla has never documented their intent.

I loaded two this morning (2,800 songs, 146 albums)....

1. 512GB Mega-flat structure with albums only with no nesting &
2. 256 Patriot with nesting of folders, Alpha + key artist, 5 levels down.

Both worked. Flat structure loaded in 2 minutes, nested 3 minutes