Update - re: missing album art
As I mentioned previously, I have a large music library on a USB flash drive that displays correct album art everywhere else I use it (Mac, iPhone, iPad, iPod), but for some reason certain songs weren’t displaying their album art in my Model S. The files on USB were simply copies made from the iTunes folder on my Mac.
I took a closer look at some of the problem songs and discovered that those copies on the USB somehow had blank file icons when viewed in the Finder on my Mac (only the problem songs had blank icons). Meanwhile the original copies of the files in my Mac iTunes library showed the artwork both within iTunes itself and in their Finder icon. So somehow the act of copying the files (via Finder drag and drop copy) from the iTunes folder to another location must have stripped SOME of the files’s embedded artwork/icon. I made new copies of the same files and icons are still strangely missing on the new copies, so this is repeatable.
Best I can tell from digging in some of the Mac forums is that there was a bug in some previous version of iTunes relating to artwork. All the problem files were old ones added to my library years ago and not touched since then, so maybe an older version of iTunes improperly embedded the artwork and somehow those old files did not copy correctly via the Finder, even though the current version of iTunes and iOS displays them correctly? Just a theory, I couldn't find a definitive cause...
I was able to visually scan through my USB contents in the Finder and easily identify files with blank file icons. I did a Get Info on those songs in iTunes, then copied and re-pasted the existing artwork in the iTunes info pane for those songs. Then I re-copied the edited files from my iTunes folder to the USB. The icons now correctly showed the artwork on the copies, and that seemed to fix almost all of the problem songs to correctly display artwork in the Tesla.
Using a tag editor I poked around the remaining handful of songs still not displaying in the Tesla MP and I discovered all of those remaining problem files had both ID3v1.1 and ID3v2.2 tags but were somehow missing album art associated with the v2.2 tag when viewed using the tag editor, even though the album art somehow was displayed in iTunes & iOS. Pasting the artwork again into the v2.2 tag using the tag editor fixed the problem and I believe now all my music files display their correct artwork in my car.
not sure if this info will help anybody having problems with album art, but anyhow there it is - I basically found 2 kinds of problem files.
next step - take a closer look at file names & weird song order on some albums (IIRC filenames can solve that) and also how compilation albums are (incorrectly) displayed
… and will keep my fingers crossed that someday they'll fix it so USB search will play more than one song, and you can shuffle all songs across all albums for a given artist...
btw, I notice with 2.52.22 that USB scans seem much faster and more consistent - about 9minutes for my USB (about 58GB on a 64GB stick, ~7400 songs). I have not witnessed any spurious rescans for over a month (since the previous firmware version 2.50.114), nor have I seen my EQ settings get randomly reset since
p.s.
You Narada guys desperately need some Mingus, ornette, miles, coltrane, or sun ra. I used to play with a pianist who said "I won't jazz up your folk if you don't folk up my jazz" but I'll never get where new age lives in that spectrum. Personal view of course!
hey! I've got Miles (as well as Narada, & Windham Hill) in my library...