Comprehensive USB Bug List

[supratachophobia]

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.

hey! I've got Miles (as well as Narada, & Windham Hill) in my library...

5 days and counting with EQ not resetting. Scanning is decidedly faster on existing source.

 

[msnow]

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.

hey! I've got Miles (as well as Narada, & Windham Hill) in my library...

Great work in identifying and fixing the problem with album art not displaying in the car.

 

[BertL]

Re iTunes Album Art. Part of the challenge can also be under certain conditions, iTunes physically maintains some album art for it's tracks/albums in a set of files used only by iTunes and not physically part of each track. (With macOS it's under /iTunes/Album Artwork in a bunch of odd and non-user-editable files. Don't touch 'um!) iTunes and it's associated Apple-music device/apps work fine with that and as a person using an Apple-only set of music players you'll never know the difference, but if you use a tag editor, the file system or another non-iTunes program to make copies of media, you'll find some don't physically have the album art themselves as you'd expect.

The solution when using non-Apple music devices to go against any of the tracks is to first ensure all tracks have their own imbedded copy of album art, not this "pointer thingy" that in-part IIRC is rather historical in nature from when iTunes had album art but there wasn't a firm standard allowing it to be tagged inside the track... There is no way in standard iTunes to figure it out where the album art actually is, so besides pulling up each track and looking for them with a external tag editor, a fast and simple way for only macOS users is to use dougscripts.com "Tracks Without Embedded Album Art" Applescript (That's what I did after taking delivery of my MS in 2015 and figuring this out.) Once installed, when you run the script on your Mac, it creates a new playlist of the tracks in this situation. From there, you could edit the tracks with a tag editor to imbed the art yourself** (PC iTunes users will have to do it that way) or dougscripts has another script to "Re-Embed Artwork" (which I have not personally used, be see no reason why it wouldn't work and save Mac-owners time and grief in this process.)

** If you externally edit media that is already known to iTunes, heed my advice. Shutdown iTunes, edit your tracks with an external tag editor, then open iTunes and go to each track you changed and rapidly play it -- you don't have to let it play all the way through, just enough so iTunes opens the track you manipulated outside of it's known universe. (I click them one-by-one in rapid succession, after seeing iTunes has started to play the track.) iTunes is smart enough as you play the track to then go "oh-oh, my internal database and the track tag data doesn't match", and under-the-covers it re-reads the tag data (and album art) in your physical track to update it's internal database for the few things it needs to. It's quick and easy to do -- just remember to touch the tracks inside iTunes after you diddle with them outside of its control and you'll be fine.​

 

[f-stop]

Re iTunes Album Art. Part of the challenge can also be under certain conditions, iTunes physically maintains some album art for it's tracks/albums in a set of files used only by iTunes and not physically part of each track. (With macOS it's under /iTunes/Album Artwork in a bunch of odd and non-user-editable files. Don't touch 'um!) iTunes and it's associated Apple-music device/apps work fine with that and as a person using an Apple-only set of music players you'll never know the difference, but if you use a tag editor, the file system or another non-iTunes program to make copies of media, you'll find some don't physically have the album art themselves as you'd expect.

The solution when using non-Apple music devices to go against any of the tracks is to first ensure all tracks have their own imbedded copy of album art, not this "pointer thingy" that in-part IIRC is rather historical in nature from when iTunes had album art but there wasn't a firm standard allowing it to be tagged inside the track... There is no way in standard iTunes to figure it out where the album art actually is, so besides pulling up each track and looking for them with a external tag editor, a fast and simple way for only macOS users is to use dougscripts.com "Tracks Without Embedded Album Art" Applescript (That's what I did after taking delivery of my MS in 2015 and figuring this out.) Once installed, when you run the script on your Mac, it creates a new playlist of the tracks in this situation. From there, you could edit the tracks with a tag editor to imbed the art yourself** (PC iTunes users will have to do it that way) or dougscripts has another script to "Re-Embed Artwork" (which I have not personally used, be see no reason why it wouldn't work and save Mac-owners time and grief in this process.)

** If you externally edit media that is already known to iTunes, heed my advice. Shutdown iTunes, edit your tracks with an external tag editor, then open iTunes and go to each track you changed and rapidly play it -- you don't have to let it play all the way through, just enough so iTunes opens the track you manipulated outside of it's known universe. (I click them one-by-one in rapid succession, after seeing iTunes has started to play the track.) iTunes is smart enough as you play the track to then go "oh-oh, my internal database and the track tag data doesn't match", and under-the-covers it re-reads the tag data (and album art) in your physical track to update it's internal database for the few things it needs to. It's quick and easy to do -- just remember to touch the tracks inside iTunes after you diddle with them outside of its control and you'll be fine.​

thanks @BertL for the informative (as always) explanation. Now that you mention it I remember seeing that separate Album Artwork folder for iTunes before and wondered how it worked but I avoided touching it. The missing artwork problem makes a lot more sense now. Years ago I used some of Doug's Applescripts for other purposes - I'd completely forgotten about them and didn't realize there was one to track down tracks without embedded album art - I'll check them out again. May be a good opportunity to go through the library and use some of the scripts to clean up filenames and other things, after all these years

 

[wdolson]

it's been quite a while since I've gone through my library with a tag editor, since it's basically been working perfectly on all my other devices for years... but perhaps I'll give that a try to see if there's anything obvious different about songs I know fail in the car... but I've got over 7000 songs on my USB, so not keen on having to do any sort of manual fiddling with the library to fix what's probably Tesla's problem...

I've used this to rename a lot of file names at once
GitHub - hervethouzard/THE-Rename: Programme Windows pour renommer ses fichiers (1998)

I generate a list of files I want to rename through a search or something. Then I save it to a file, then make another file with the before and after list, load it into TheRename using the rename from list function and it does all the work from there.

With an editor like Word or something else with a good search and replace function, modifying the list isn't tough.

 

[tomas]

The more I think about what's gone on recently, it seems to me unwise to go through large scale tag editing until we see what 8.1 and a few subsequent 8.1 cleanup releases have for us. Just thinking about how many things have bounced around since 8.0...

For most people, it seems what we have now is 90%+ functional, with some issues around compilations. Patience!

 

[msnow]

The more I think about what's gone on recently, it seems to me unwise to go through large scale tag editing until we see what 8.1 and a few subsequent 8.1 cleanup releases have for us. Just thinking about how many things have bounced around since 8.0...

For most people, it seems what we have now is 90%+ functional, with some issues around compilations. Patience!

Not sure where your "90%+" came from and there's more issues than just compilations from what I read from @BertL and others. "Patience"? Some of this stuff was broken in 7.1 too. IMHO most people here have been more than patient and losing confidence that Tesla knows how to fix this stuff.
Agree, it's not worth doing a lot of metadata editing until after 8.1.x.

 

[BertL]

The more I think about what's gone on recently, it seems to me unwise to go through large scale tag editing until we see what 8.1 and a few subsequent 8.1 cleanup releases have for us. Just thinking about how many things have bounced around since 8.0...

For most people, it seems what we have now is 90%+ functional, with some issues around compilations. Patience!

Yes, I definitely agree to not go crazy.

...but IMHO if one is personally working to achieve what the ID3 standards are trying to accomplish, provide better consistency and access to our own media around our non-automobile-centric lives, AND what will work with their Tesla, some things can proceed.

I for one, refuse to make changes to my master iTunes library that manipulate it beyond the standards, just because it works around some problem (only) Tesla has with their Media Player. I have spent man-months over many years, doing things like cleaning up my tags for consistency and causing my individual track album art to be imbedded as current standard ID3 provide. I have an original iTunes library from way back when it started with Windows back in-the-day before there were a lot of other standards, and migrated it to my now Mac-only environment with more than 28K tracks, so continuing to clean it up over the years made sense to me.

Life with my former Lexus, BMW and MBZ were easy being able to hardwire-connect an IPod to each of their Infotainment systems. I NEVER thought much being able to sync, use my playlists, or having my tunes play the way I expected in any of those very different mfgr environments in 4 or 5 different vehicles I owned. I knew my music life would be different before ordering my MS back in 2015 -- just not THIS much.

With my Tesla, what I do is make copies of the tracks I want to play in my MS using a combination of iTunes Smart Playlists and a macOS-only app that reads those playlists, making copies of the tracks into a temporary sub directory on my HDD. I set it and walk away for an hour or two to complete. I then use dBpoweramp to convert the various formats those extracted tracks and tags are encoded with, transforming them all into FLAC with other very consistent changes attempting to workaround Tesla's idosycrocies from my POV. Depending on the source track encoding format, that second step takes 2-15+ (yes!) hours for 7K tracks to be converted as I'm off doing something else, but my source media library remains "pure" from my POV as Tesla continues to march to its own drummer. I just have to take my own time to discover, understand, and then adapt the tweaks dBpoweramp makes in its transformation process to make me happiest with Tesla's latest MP iteration. It's still not perfect or as good as media-life in my 3-20 year-old Lexus, BMW, and MBZ were, but is more tolerable.

My net? People should continue to follow their desire if they have any, to standardize their master Media libraries against current standards well beyond what Tesla can influence. "Have at it" with your tag and album art changes. Then, watch threads like this, and use tools to extract and make temporary copies of your tracks that can be transformed for use with particular releases of Tesla's USB Media Player focused on the things that bug you most. We're each different, so one size won't fit all. I appreciate this track transformation and tag tweaking is a lot of gobbly-de-gook to most folks, and definitely a lot of unnecessary work for many of us owners that care about easily listening to our own music while driving. It is though, the reality Tesla continues to elect to put many of its owners in, in the otherwise best BEV available today. Sigh.

 

[X Fan]

Spent substantial amount of time tagging and setting up albums by artist I can use on my x.

However, it still provides three different album counts ( varies by day sometimes), sometimes starts up right away, other times needs to rerun for up to five minutes even if I had just left the car for five minutes and xm radio continues to be a real challenge.

90%? Nah, 50.

 

[PaulR]

Just wondering.... many of you live in California (sorry I live in the far east - Georgia) and I was thinking that one of you who is knowledgeable in how all this works could "drop in" the facility where the Tesla programmers work and ask to speak to the head of that area. Maybe Tweet Elon and ask him to allow you to do so? A crazy approach, but no crazier than a lot of things going on today

 

[supratachophobia]

Not sure where your "90%+" came from and there's more issues than just compilations from what I read from @BertL and others. "Patience"? Some of this stuff was broken in 7.1 too. IMHO most people here have been more than patient and losing confidence that Tesla knows how to fix this stuff.
Agree, it's not worth doing a lot of metadata editing until after 8.1.x.

We call @tomas a "glass is half full" kind of guy.

 

[tomas]

We call @tomas a "glass is half full" kind of guy.

Thanks! I just try to avoid reiterating complaints, as there are plenty on the forum to reiterate my complaints for me.

Is it possible to separate the state of the media player in the most recent release from the frustration about how we got here? When I say it is 90% functional, I'm not discounting the annoyance of the incompetence in 8.0 (and even in earlier MP releases... for years it did not recognize tracks with non English letters in tags). I'm just commenting that the current version has overcome most of the initial 8.0 regressions (frequent reloads, bad sorting, no alpha search), and the current main gripes seem to be things like compilations and inconsistent song counts... nits vs where we were 3 months ago.

And I was suggesting it might not be wise to do massive tag editing when 8.1 and another round of changes and no doubt re-changes will hit us. Unless people just love tag editing...

 

[supratachophobia]

Thanks! I just try to avoid reiterating complaints, as there are plenty on the forum to reiterate my complaints for me.

Is it possible to separate the state of the media player in the most recent release from the frustration about how we got here? When I say it is 90% functional, I'm not discounting the annoyance of the incompetence in 8.0 (and even in earlier MP releases... for years it did not recognize tracks with non English letters in tags). I'm just commenting that the current version has overcome most of the initial 8.0 regressions (frequent reloads, bad sorting, no alpha search), and the current main gripes seem to be things like compilations and inconsistent song counts... nits vs where we were 3 months ago.

And I was suggesting it might not be wise to do massive tag editing when 8.1 and another round of changes and no doubt re-changes will hit us. Unless people just love tag editing...

As a fairly long-term owner, multiple cars, and a heavy IT background, I'd like to think I see both sides of the issue. But every owner has to look at the facts and decide for themselves.

Infotainment has been done for a while, and many have done it well (some have done is very poorly). One could argue that if some of these manufactures could apply OTA updates as well as have the pulse on owner feedback (and loyalty) that Tesla does, their software would be damn near perfect.

The feature set as it stands is very rich, semi-intuitive (could do with more tweaking so that we have less button presses), unique/innovative with regards to things like pre-heating and summon.

However, the quality of software if you look it over the process is just plain sloppy. The entire Tesla software development life-cycle is marked with half-tested features, undocumented changes (daytime running lights anyone?), and things that just plain don't work. And while I would agree that 90% of things eventually do get fixed, we have to put up with it for however long until they do.

And when I personally weigh the following: "I am thankful to have a nice car with decent software and a company that cares about me." vs. "I am an owner of a car that potentially could cost well into the 6 figures, yet the software works against me."...... It's frustrating to say the least.

 

[bmah]

Just wondering.... many of you live in California (sorry I live in the far east - Georgia) and I was thinking that one of you who is knowledgeable in how all this works could "drop in" the facility where the Tesla programmers work and ask to speak to the head of that area. Maybe Tweet Elon and ask him to allow you to do so? A crazy approach, but no crazier than a lot of things going on today

The following is purely my opinion / speculation and not substantiated by any interactions with anyone within Tesla:

This is an interesting idea that I haven't seen anyone propose before. Unfortunately, I can't see that approach working in any of the companies I've worked at (from start-ups to a large router vendor). You don't cold-call on the head of a software development team and tell her about all the problems you see with that team's work. There might be ways to have that conversation, but the only way I can see that happening would be for someone to use their existing contacts inside Tesla to find the right person, and to carefully approach that person in a friendly, non-threatening way. I think it's likely that the media player problems are already well-known inside Tesla, and the team(s) in question are just bandwidth-limited and they have no time to make more improvements anyway. At least I can visualize this happening in the development organizations I've been in.

Note also that we wouldn't have that level of access at any other car company (or indeed almost any other tech company I can think of)...this isn't an open source project on GitHub where we can see all the sausage being made.

Bruce.

 

[X Fan]

Thanks! I just try to avoid reiterating complaints, as there are plenty on the forum to reiterate my complaints for me.

Is it possible to separate the state of the media player in the most recent release from the frustration about how we got here? When I say it is 90% functional, I'm not discounting the annoyance of the incompetence in 8.0 (and even in earlier MP releases... for years it did not recognize tracks with non English letters in tags). I'm just commenting that the current version has overcome most of the initial 8.0 regressions (frequent reloads, bad sorting, no alpha search), and the current main gripes seem to be things like compilations and inconsistent song counts... nits vs where we were 3 months ago.

And I was suggesting it might not be wise to do massive tag editing when 8.1 and another round of changes and no doubt re-changes will hit us. Unless people just love tag editing...

FWIW: You probably have an advanced version of SW because I (and others I see) still see frequent reloads per week, sometimes multiple per day....all on a stable set of music.

 

[PaulR]

The following is purely my opinion / speculation and not substantiated by any interactions with anyone within Tesla:

This is an interesting idea that I haven't seen anyone propose before. Unfortunately, I can't see that approach working in any of the companies I've worked at (from start-ups to a large router vendor). You don't cold-call on the head of a software development team and tell her about all the problems you see with that team's work. There might be ways to have that conversation, but the only way I can see that happening would be for someone to use their existing contacts inside Tesla to find the right person, and to carefully approach that person in a friendly, non-threatening way. I think it's likely that the media player problems are already well-known inside Tesla, and the team(s) in question are just bandwidth-limited and they have no time to make more improvements anyway. At least I can visualize this happening in the development organizations I've been in.

Note also that we wouldn't have that level of access at any other car company (or indeed almost any other tech company I can think of)...this isn't an open source project on GitHub where we can see all the sausage being made.

Bruce.

Bruce, I agree with your assessment. I have had experience in running a fairly large company and am sensitive to your concerns. Just venting I guess....

Thanks for your intelligent and well thought out answer...

Paul

 

[Alkettory]

Every morning when I get in the MS to drive to work, I see "Loading xx%". It does not complete before I get to work (38,000 tracks on a 1TB USB SSD). When I get in the car to go home from work, I have music to listen to on the way home.

So, for me, 50% functional is a pretty good description.

 

[PaulR]

@Alkettory - So many variables here to consider, but, perhaps, the most important is to know what firmware version you are on? The problem you are seeing was a common complaint here (re-scanning of the USB or SSD). The larger the drive/data base, the longer it takes to re-scan/re-load. The percentage you are seeing is the estimated percentage which the media player has reached as it tries to re-load the data. I and may others have previously experienced this (sometimes the re-loads seem to have forgotten our "favorites also) and when I installed my latest firmware update that problem seems to have stopped.

By the way, I am on 2.52.22. Using a 256 GB SSD.

 

[msnow]

FWIW: You probably have an advanced version of SW because I (and others I see) still see frequent reloads per week, sometimes multiple per day....all on a stable set of music.

Not necessarily true. I have 2.52.22 (like most people here) and I have zero reloads unless I remove and then reinsert the stick. I don't think the cause of reloads is known yet.

 

[PaulR]

Not necessarily true. I have 2.52.22 (like most people here) and I have zero reloads unless I remove and then reinsert the stick. I don't think the cause of reloads is known yet.

+1 I also don't have any reloads since updating to 2.52.22