Comprehensive USB Bug List

[tomas]

Here's how I reproduced it this morning.
1. Was listening to the USB source as usual yesterday. Verified that Dolby Surround was on.
2. Switched to the radio to hear the Sharks game on 98.5 FM.
3. Left the car overnight with the audio source still set to Radio.
4. Came back to the car this morning, switched from Radio to USB, and started playing a song.
5. Opened the equalizer panel to check its status, and sure enough, Dolby Surround was off.

This is not surprising. Some audio is not suitable for Dolby, so it appears smart enough to switch off. It would be good if it could remember by source, but even then it could switch off if you played a track that couldn't be dolbyized. I guess smartest design would be leave Dolby switch on and only temporarily override by track.

 

[BertL]

This is not surprising. Some audio is not suitable for Dolby, so it appears smart enough to switch off. It would be good if it could remember by source, but even then it could switch off if you played a track that couldn't be dolbyized. I guess smartest design would be leave Dolby switch on and only temporarily override by track.

Frankly, I bet it's just another obscure bug in Tesla's firmware, not a design point. IMHO there are too many unexplainable things with MP, to give Tesla even partial credit for this being a possible feature that still has a major usability flaw.

 

[tomas]

Frankly, I bet it's just another obscure bug in Tesla's firmware, not a design point. IMHO there are too many unexplainable things with MP, to give Tesla even partial credit for this being a possible feature that still has a major usability flaw.

Compare that to my egolf where every single setting is reset every time I start the car. Tesla looks like heaven.

 

[thecloud]

I've reproduced it twice more, just to make sure. The odd part is that after I switch from USB to Radio, the Dolby Surround setting appears to remain enabled (i.e. the checkbox is still checked.) It only switches off after the car goes to sleep and wakes up with the source set to Radio.

As you said, some audio is not suitable for Dolby and it wouldn't surprise me that there's code to detect that, but it seems like a bug that it doesn't always attempt to retain my preferred setting. Why is there a switch at all if the software is going to be smarter than me?

 

[supratachophobia]

I've reproduced it twice more, just to make sure. The odd part is that after I switch from USB to Radio, the Dolby Surround setting appears to remain enabled (i.e. the checkbox is still checked.) It only switches off after the car goes to sleep and wakes up with the source set to Radio.

As you said, some audio is not suitable for Dolby and it wouldn't surprise me that there's code to detect that, but it seems like a bug that it doesn't always attempt to retain my preferred setting. Why is there a switch at all if the software is going to be smarter than me?

I *think* we've determined that with all the bugs in the media player, that the car, in that aspect, isn't nearly as smart as you. Maybe as smart as me, but definitely not you.

 

[BertL]

...As you said, some audio is not suitable for Dolby and it wouldn't surprise me that there's code to detect that, but it seems like a bug that it doesn't always attempt to retain my preferred setting...

Personally, if Tesla were gonna try and be smart anticipating the desires of its Owners with the Dolby Setting based on the source, I'd much prefer when the option is checked, that MP just:

• use real Dolby to decode the few tracks/sources an Owner may have with true Dolby Surround encoding. (There are not many, especially if one wants real surround sound tracks that tend to be mostly available on only DVDs. That's how I used to show-off my real Harmon Kardon Surround Sound capability in my last MBZ, and it was pretty dang awesome.)
• but more interestingly, generate a simulated surround mode from any other mono/stereo-only source. That's more how I've been able to set my Home Pioneer and Denon Receivers to work for years and years creating a fuller sound for general music listening, and how my previous Lexus and MBZ worked with their upgraded audio systems as well. That way, purists that believe they can hear track subtleties with all the ambient/road noise, could just keep the option unchecked as they probably already do today.

 

[X Fan]

Anything improve with 8.1 release?

 

[BertL]

Anything improve with 8.1 release?

I've not done (and am not sure I will) do any extensive 8.1 testing, although my SvC did install 8.1.7.11.3 onto my MS today when it was in for service. I'll summarize my very cursory views while driving 45 mins home in traffic (so it's not super scientific or complete) like this:

• My SvC was unable to recreate any of my Tesla Twilight Zone issues (didn't expect they would), but interestingly, they also did not find any entries in the log for my previously-reported-in-this-thread CID hangs, despite my providing date/time of when the last two situations occurred.

What Tesla did do was erase all Nav History (sound familiar as part of the workarounds some of us created here on TMC more than a year ago to help other forum members address likely memory issues?), and installed 7.11.3 which they told me "provided firmware improvements that should address the issue". As to if that means a new kernel, they couldn't answer that. If my problems persist, I'll have to bring it back and they'll dive "deeper".​

• From playing with MP USB on the way home, using my same USB SSD and 8.0 workarounds (tag changes, file renames, smaller jpg images, etc) as previously reported I'm using, nothing seemed different to me. Hopefully I'm mistaken as I take more time with it in upcoming days/weeks. So, take that to mean what you think it perhaps does, since my overt track/tag changes break other well-implemented players.

My perception from other threads and not a lot of time yet with 7.11.3 is Elon focused all Tesla's resources on AP2 parity with AP1 functionality (which is a good thing for those folks), and had everyone else probably focused on Model 3 except those building yet another useless Easter Egg that just grabbed some press headlines and internet chatter, but did NOTHING to resolve outstanding problems owners put up with 7x24x365. With the new voice functionality and favorites tweaks to streaming sources that were cited in these release notes, I doubt very much anything of substance was done with this forums attempts at providing Tesla with a well-thought-out and disciplined set of Infotainment Requirements from back in Fall 2015; Owner's personal cards and letters; What I suspect at least one other frequent contributor here has done trying to provide prioritized input to Tesla insiders a couple of time; and of course some of our bitc&ing and moaning in threads like this about something that needs to be at least as good as $30 boom boxes from Walmart -- hoping Tesla people are reading and using this input in their prioritization processes. Beyond AP1-AP2 Parity, unfortunately, the press seems focused if there is a new browser in 8.1, and now little else. I frankly don't care about the browser, and I doubt most owners do that use any amount of Infotainment functionality. Instead, give me an updated kernel with improved USB error recovery (if it's not there already), a bunch of Tesla-acknowledged bug fixes, and a few features to bring Tesla's Infotainment Basics closer to what everyone else provides in their lower-line models.

Yes, as an AP1 and USB kinda owner, I'm initially very disappointed with 8.1. It's far from being a WOW. Time for me to find and open a bottle of wine! Hopefully a little more time with 7.11.3 will reveal some cherries for us all. I look forward to what others find.

 

[hiroshiy]

Had only 30 minutes of driving on congested highway. I couldn't find any music skipping during the drive. Will check tomorrow in more detail.

 

[BertL]

Bert’s Media Player 8.1 17.11.3 Observations & Workarounds

Since I took a self-imposed break from more detailed multi-day testing in early November back in the days of 2.42.40, we've had more than 500 new posts to this thread and the hyped "8.1" level of firmware is starting it's rollout. As such, I thought it may be worth my spending a short (as in 3 hours) to do some quick re-testing and summarize where I think I am with 8.1. Hopefully it helps someone. YMMV of course!

The net for those that don't like detail, is it does not appear much, if anything has changed with USB support from 8.0 to this initial 8.1 release.

WHAT DOES WORK

Physical USB Device Characteristics & Formats

• USB devices formatted as FAT or FAT32 work. NTFS is documented in the 10/26/2016 Owners Manual as also being supported. DO NOT use exFAT -- it won't work.
• I did not try my extensive collection of USB devices (see upthread), but my Kingston 2GB which has my test files, as well as my latest PNY Elite 480GB USB 3.0 SSD work just fine

Audio (Encoding) Formats

• AAC, M4A Lossy, OGG Vorbis, WAV, MP3, AIF, FLAC work. I will leave testing to someone else if you want to determine what bit rates work within those formats, or if other more obscure formats seem to also be supported.
• ** OLD BUG: M4A (Apple) Lossless shows in the interface, but continues to then show "Loading Error" upon playback. Convert and use FLAC as a workaround in your Tesla.
• MWV will not show in the interface. As I've suggested upthread, it's time for you to migrate to something more current.
• FLA will not show in the interface. Use FLAC as the filename extension.
• M4V will not show in the interface. So much for trying to playback true Dolby Surround sound. If you really want to listen to that soundtrack, you'll need to extract it yourself and put into a different supported format for Tesla playback.
• PDF (in case you have digital booklets) will not show in the interface. IMHO that's a good thing.

Basic ID3 Tagging

• ALBUM (title) - used correctly
• ALBUMARTIST - not used, but IMHO should be as discussed upthread
• ** DISCNUMBER - STILL not used, which is a BUG as discussed upthread and again below
• GENRE - used correctly
• PARTOFCOMPILATION - not used
• TRACKARTIST - used correctly, perhaps to a fault. Same upthread suggestions.
• ** TRACKNUMBER - not consistently used, but that should not stop you from tagging your tracks correctly in the first place
• TRACKTITLE - used

Album Artwork

• I re-tested both JPG and PNG album art in 100-bit increments from 300x300 to 1500x1500 embedded in both M4A and FLAC files. All combinations worked successfully. There have been reports of other image types also working, but I have not tried them myself.
  • Note: Present MP displays a max image size just under 300x300
  • Note: I suggest storing a single image imbedded as part of your encoded file as the "Front Cover". My limited tests for situations with multiple Front Covers or use of the many others variations that are available, is only the first "Front Cover" will be used by the interface and others are properly ignored.

OLD BUGS, BUGS, & MORE BUGS

• ** M4A (Apple) Lossless encoded files show in the interface, but continue to then show "Loading Error" upon playback
  
• Sort Order within the interface remains problematic
  • ** Songs, Artists, Albums, & Genre View access should use DISCNUMBER+TRACKNUMBER; not mix-in the use of FILENAME at the lowest sort level with ID3 tag usage as it does with some views today
  • Folder View should use only alphanumerically-sorted directory and FILENAMEs; not mix file structure naming with ID3 tag data as it does now. It's just too confusing. Additionally, directory names need to always be presented at the top of the list, per standard convention.
  • "A", "An", and "The" should be displayed, but ignored when sorting tag data per convention
• DISCNUMBER and TRACKNUMBER are not consistently used together for proper sequenced display and playback of multi-disc tracks within the UI. This compounds the Sort Order issues when attempting to playback tracks of a single album composed of multiple discs.
• ** Improper Handling of Compilation Discs:
  • Tracks with the same ALBUM (title), but different ALBUMARTIST (such as "Greatest Hits" or "Christmas") will display tracks from both albums in some places of the interface as if they were a single album, exacerbating sequential playback possibilities
  • Album Artwork can therefore be wrong for some of the tracks, despite it being correct within the track tagging itself
  • NOTE: Unlike some here, I DO NOT want the PARTOFCOMPILATION tag or other more obscure variants to be adopted by Tesla. Rather, IMHO, Tesla should use ALBUM+ALBUMARTIST to distinguish between unique albums across the interface to resolve a number of UI bugs and help the majority of today and tomorrow's owners.
• Phantom "EF1 200MB" device sometimes appears as the 2nd USB device, when nothing is attached. Yes, this is still there with 8.1.

NOT TRIED OR YET ENCOUNTERED WITH 8.1 (So, I'm not personally willing to say anything has changed)

• Studdering. It's been very infrequent for me in recent months. Last occurrence was in January with 8.0.
• "Lack of Shuffle Randomness". It appears we have the same issue we've reported for months, but it's too soon for me to say for sure.
• Unexpected Scan / Rescan
  • NOTE: I name each USB device I own and use in my Tesla with a different volume name. When I disconnected my USB SSD to put in my USB Stick to test things this morning, a quick scan was performed as expected. When I removed the USB stick and plugged my SSD back in without change, there was no rescan -- tracks were immediately available for playing. I've not had that happen that way before 8.1.
• Clearing MP Album Art. It used to be that a full reboot would clear album art from the CID cache, but as reported upthread, that changed in more recent firmware drops such that you could change album art on your USB device, but it would not always be picked-up by the scan/rescan process, with MP continuing to display the original album art for tracks with the same album title. I simply have not taken the time to test the combinations of this one... I'll leave it for someone else to explore.
• Dolby Checkbox Pervasiveness. Some have reported problems with this in the past. I've not encountered issues in 2.52.22 or with just a few hours of 17.11.3. We'll see.
• Unexpected CID Hang/Reboot as part of BertL's upthread Tesla Twilight Zone posts. I still don't know if this is or is not related to USB. As of 3/30, my Tesla SvC could not find any issues in my log around the times of my last occurrences, and suggest that 17.11.3 will fix the issues. Time will tell.
• Searching -- both verbally and via CID. I've not tried either in 8.1. Your turn to contribute to the forum collective.

"FEATURE REQUESTS" -- Your list may be different. Great, but this is my post. ...and yes, since this thread is specific to USB, that's all that is in my list. If we expand to "Infotainment", my wish list is quite different.

• Document what is and is not supported. Last Owner's Manual Update was 10/26/2016 with the inclusion of NTFS, but nothing else.
• Implement M3U Playlists
• ** Implement Automatic Volume Leveling (AVL) or Automatic Sound Leveling (ASL) as most other major mfgrs provide with their premium sound systems
• Improved and more logical drill-down to other album/artist songs with touch-points across the USB UI

BERT'S WORKAROUND

1. I extract files from my iTunes master library using Export for iTunes (Mac Store). There is more discussion upthread on my reasoning why keeping the number of tracks to a reasonable number makes for a better experience -- at least for me. I target a maximum around 6700 tracks (85%+ lossless) for use in my MS.
2. I then use dBPowerAmp Reference (Windows or latest Mac R16 Beta version) to convert those selected files into FLAC within a series of album folders as the 2nd-level directory on my PNY SSD device. I end up with a Tesla-specific set of named, tagged and encoded tracks that workaround most of the annoyances I have with MP, so I can make use of most of the standard Tesla interface with the converted tracks and not be bound to Folder-view alone.
   
   For those that use dBPowerAmp Reference and want to give the Converter a go, I encode all of my files to FLAC at Lossless Level 5, and output to my USB device with this directory/filename construct "Album - Album Artist/DiskTrackNum Title". My latest DSP settings file is attached. Key things it does include:

• Most of the bigger Bugs and Requirements marked ** above are resolved or have partial workarounds
• Change all Album Art to jpg and to a maximum size of 300x300 to hopefully improve compatibility and reduce CID memory consumption
• Delete most extraneous ID3 tags not used by MP in an attempt at simplification, memory and CPU reduction
• Place ALBUMARTIST into TRACKARTIST, knowing it isn't perfect, but it certainly reduces CID memory consumption, while allowing me to to use the standard MP interface (Songs, Albums) that are otherwise unusable
• Album names that are the same, but for different artists or groups, are renamed to resolve the wrong-album-art and some of the "compilation" issues others report
  • (The process is manual, so if my settings don't resolve some of your albums, go into ID Tag Processing / Settings / Manipulation / Rule Based Manipulation / and add another pair of the "If Album=... Set Album..." lines to address your need. It should be obvious what you need to duplicate when you see it.)
• Tracks are renamed to allow proper sequential playback of both single and multi-disc albums
  • (This isn't all done in settings, but rather where you specify the output destination within dBpoweramp Converter. It's why the filename construct I suggest above is so important).
• Emulates what AVL/ASL does realtime in other vehicles, i.e. reducing the amount of volume fiddling you have to do as cabin noise changes and different tracks play back (especially if you listen on random/shuffle as much as I do crossing artists, albums and genre with the varying volume levels that entails).
  • I've experimented with every option available in several tools, as well as in dBpoweramp. I've found this latest set of dBpoweramp parameters that are good to my ears and I've been using for several months now -- actually re-encoding all tracks I play in my Tesla to a normalized volume level watching peak-to-peak values over small spans of time, similar to what you are likely doing in your head while listening to music and then adjusting the volume control. There is still soft and quiet in each track, and I bet you won't tell a difference listening to just one track alone, but my left index finger thanks me a lot for not having to sit on the steering wheel button as much these days. Beware that this is VERY CPU INTENSE. On my quad-core 4gHz i7, it takes about 13X longer to do the processing when this is enabled. It will take exponentially longer if you don't have a multi-core PC or Mac. If you don't want this function, just delete the "Volume Normalize" DSP Effect in settings before you make your run. Easy.

Good luck. Happy USB Listening! I'm back to my "no more testing" mode again (at least for awhile).

 

[Doctt]

Thank you. Very helpful

 

[aesculus]

The net for those that don't like detail, is it does not appear much, if anything has changed with USB support from 8.0 to this initial 8.1 release.

Thanks. So much for waiting for them to repair the problems they fixed before but then destroyed with Christmas Eggs.

 

[BertL]

Thanks. So much for waiting for them to repair the problems they fixed before but then destroyed with Christmas Eggs.

Yeah, well, with the new Elon Tweets and Elektrek report that came out earlier this afternoon (see other threads for links), perhaps we'll see some improvement in another code drop approx 6 weeks from now. That will be great when it happens, but at the same time I hope anyone reading this does not then come back with joyous accolades how Tesla listened and improved things, as they will loose credibility from my POV...

Rant ON:

This is gonna be brutal, but the facts from my POV are what they are. Lots of firmware bugs, some of which are basic design flaws. Some formally acknowledged and in existence for years. With few exceptions, it appears that Infotainment has taken a backseat to AP and other Tesla Exec priorities since MS was initially introduced, and come up in recent times lacking basic capabilities that other non-luxury brands have provided as standard for years. There was initial owner/enthusiast acceptance that engineering resources may be scarce within Tesla being a start-up, but for some like myself, that has become a diminishing excuse in more recent times, especially when a handful of engineers sitting behind desks could work on Infotainment (which is pretty well defined in the industry), and are likely not of the more senior level required to work bleeding edge and research-oriented things like AP, Falcon Wings or new M3 single-display UI. Many owners have individually reported bugs and suggestions. At least one insider has perhaps tried to work their internal connections at least a couple of times, and there have been several group attempts here on TMC to help provide a well thought-out prioritized list of improvements back to Tesla more than a year ago. Multiple Tweets from the CEO about promised new functionality and availability have come out over many months, that simply have been missed or not come true, while new useless Easter Eggs continue to be produced, promoted into the Press, and oogled by the Fanboys. There has been little, if any, in the way of visible-to-the-owner-community methods where Tesla is using any recent external input on what's most important -- e.g. there are no user councils like other mfgs have to help keep a real ear to what's happening and needed, vs. what appears to be an internal more isolated POV producing what more isolated leaders deem as important. Granted, many Tesla owners today are in this for the long haul vision, but as Tesla grows, both vision AND whats expected by today's owners and owners-to-be have to be taken into account,

I'll be pleasantly surprised, but not truly thankful, if and when Tesla finally fixes many of these non-sexy outstanding firmware bugs, and catches up with Infotainment capabilities other mfgrs have had for years. My MS -- which is still my most beloved possession -- will then be close to the expectations I had before I ordered it nearly 18 months ago. I appreciate if and when the improvements come, it won't help produce a lot of positive press when Tesla is "catching up" vs "leading the pack" as AP headlines and yet another fun Easter Egg tend to produce for a short period of time. IMO, fixing some of this more mundane firmware needs to be done and is well overdue -- no different than how well Tesla has proven it can resolve HW or Press-sensitive topics that seem to be addressed faster than lightning -- especially when Tesla has the ability to do most of this Infotainment work by only engineers without other capital investments, and can deliver it OTA. Let's just hope we see the long-awaited quality improvements to Media Player, USB support, and Infotainment as a whole, sooner than later for the Tesla Owners and prospective buyers that care.​

Rant OFF:

 

[X Fan]

Thanks Bert, great report!

Not pertinent to USB, but does anyone know if XM problems got fixed?

 

[drklain]

With 8.1 I am now seeing the "skipping" or "studdering" you mentioned. Had not seen it before with 8.0. Start playing a USB song and it will at random intervals in the song go silent and then start again about a second later as if the song was still playing and I had turned the volume down for a second (or as if going under a bridge with XM). No changes to the USB stick. I did leave it plugged in during 8.1 upgrade. Have tried rebooting center MCU with no success. Open to any ideas others may have.

 

[neroden]

My perception from other threads and not a lot of time yet with 7.11.3 is Elon... did NOTHING to resolve outstanding problems owners put up with 7x24x365.... about something that needs to be at least as good as $30 boom boxes from Walmart...

Harsh but accurate.

I reported the lack of gapless playback FOUR years ago. They haven't lifted a finger to provide functionality available on *tape decks* (as well as all decent CD players). I even told them what free, open-source, reskinnable audio player for Linux to use the code from if they were really lazy (just supply a copyright notice and copy of the license with the car, you're good).

They aren't even effing trying.

This is what's wrong with Tesla. Hopefully they'll get their act together by 2018 or 2019. If not, they will at that time be killed by the competition (which isn't really arriving until 2019 or 2020).

P.S. "Gapless playback" should be listed on the list of old bugs. It's a very old bug. Makes it damn near impossible to listen to radio plays or concept albums.

 

[BertL]

With 8.1 I am now seeing the "skipping" or "studdering" you mentioned. Had not seen it before with 8.0. Start playing a USB song and it will at random intervals in the song go silent and then start again about a second later as if the song was still playing and I had turned the volume down for a second (or as if going under a bridge with XM). No changes to the USB stick. I did leave it plugged in during 8.1 upgrade. Have tried rebooting center MCU with no success. Open to any ideas others may have.

No new ideas or solid workarounds I've been able to come up with, especially since the last couple of code drops seem to have eliminated the way for an owner to consistently clear "free memory" in the CID, i.e. Album Art does not disappear as it always did before during the full reboot process (meaning foot on the brake, press both scroll wheels, release the brake and buttons only when the Tesla T reappears) ... but, my SvC did erase my very limited Nav/Trip History (only 10-12 entries, as I keep mine very small on purpose ) as a preventive measure for my unexplained CID reboots this past Thursday, in addition to installing 17..., so maybe there is something still to my whole "constrained processor and memory" theory I've been discussing for more than a year contributing to at least part of our MP failures.

Off the top of my head, here are things under our control that may reduce CID processor and memory consumption, hopefully freeing it up for more consistent MP playback use.

1. Erase your Nav Trip History one-by-one
2. Erase any unnecessary Nav destination favorites
3. Reduce the number of contacts on your phone that are syncin' to your MS
4. Run Nav in only 1/2-screen line mode, not satellite-view full screen at the other extreme (which certainly consumes more processor pulling down and translating more graphical data, if not also memory than line-mode does)
5. If you have a lot of MP Favorites, reduce them to only what you really need
6. Flatten the directory structure on your USB device (perhaps 1-3 max)
7. Reduce the number of tracks on your USB device (I use ~6700). In general, physical size of the tracks (i.e.KB, MB, GB) just can't be as big of a consideration unless free CID memory is already maxed-out or we're talking truly HUGE individual files.
8. Reduce the amount of ID3 tag data and eliminate tags unused by MP (e.g. long TRACKARTIST on many compilation-like albums can be overwhelming in their memory impact, and we don't know how smart MP really is storing or not unused ID3 tag data for what period of time)
9. Reduce the size of your Album Art (I'm stretching on this one as none of us know for a fact what is really stored in MP -- the full size contained with our tracks, only the largest ~300x300 image, or both that and the mini-image used in other parts of the interface)

Beyond poor MP/USB design & quality I suspect even Tesla would agree is at issue, the other thing out of our control is MP playback prioritization within the OS itself -- meaning, when the CID is already managing the display and all that functionality, then perhaps pulling down a new software update or on-the-fly data for AP to use, or sending AP or log data back up to the mothership, or doing something else Tesla considers more important -- does that become a point-in-time when stuttering, stalls or other unusual playback things occur. I bet so, but only Tesla Engineers could confirm it as a fact.

Good luck.

 

[BertL]

Harsh but accurate.

I reported the lack of gapless playback FOUR years ago. They haven't lifted a finger to provide functionality available on *tape decks* (as well as all decent CD players). I even told them what free, open-source, reskinnable audio player for Linux to use the code from if they were really lazy (just supply a copyright notice and copy of the license with the car, you're good).

They aren't even effing trying.

This is what's wrong with Tesla. Hopefully they'll get their act together by 2018 or 2019. If not, they will at that time be killed by the competition (which isn't really arriving until 2019 or 2020).

P.S. "Gapless playback" should be listed on the list of old bugs. It's a very old bug. Makes it damn near impossible to listen to radio plays or concept albums.

Yup. ...and good catch on "Gapless Playback" also as a requirement. I forgot that one with everything else!

 

[bob_p]

8.1 really seems more like one of the 8.0 AP 2 updates than what was promised as 8.1.

The media player seems to have all of the same bugs that were introduced as "improvements" in the media player for 8.0.

I had the stuttering listening to a Bluetooth audio book yesterday - so it's not just USB playback.

The USB player still forgets the current song or position when returning to the car.

The "random" USB sequence is still the same - every time.

XM radio lost the station slider - and cars produced after 8.0 was released may not be able to get a station list.

Hopefully we'll see the real 8.1 release soon, with the promised media player fixes...

 

[supratachophobia]

I've not done (and am not sure I will) do any extensive 8.1 testing, although my SvC did install 8.1.7.11.3 onto my MS today when it was in for service. I'll summarize my very cursory views while driving 45 mins home in traffic (so it's not super scientific or complete) like this:

• My SvC was unable to recreate any of my Tesla Twilight Zone issues (didn't expect they would), but interestingly, they also did not find any entries in the log for my previously-reported-in-this-thread CID hangs, despite my providing date/time of when the last two situations occurred.

What Tesla did do was erase all Nav History (sound familiar as part of the workarounds some of us created here on TMC more than a year ago to help other forum members address likely memory issues?), and installed 7.11.3 which they told me "provided firmware improvements that should address the issue". As to if that means a new kernel, they couldn't answer that. If my problems persist, I'll have to bring it back and they'll dive "deeper".​

• From playing with MP USB on the way home, using my same USB SSD and 8.0 workarounds (tag changes, file renames, smaller jpg images, etc) as previously reported I'm using, nothing seemed different to me. Hopefully I'm mistaken as I take more time with it in upcoming days/weeks. So, take that to mean what you think it perhaps does, since my overt track/tag changes break other well-implemented players.

My perception from other threads and not a lot of time yet with 7.11.3 is Elon focused all Tesla's resources on AP2 parity with AP1 functionality (which is a good thing for those folks), and had everyone else probably focused on Model 3 except those building yet another useless Easter Egg that just grabbed some press headlines and internet chatter, but did NOTHING to resolve outstanding problems owners put up with 7x24x365. With the new voice functionality and favorites tweaks to streaming sources that were cited in these release notes, I doubt very much anything of substance was done with this forums attempts at providing Tesla with a well-thought-out and disciplined set of Infotainment Requirements from back in Fall 2015; Owner's personal cards and letters; What I suspect at least one other frequent contributor here has done trying to provide prioritized input to Tesla insiders a couple of time; and of course some of our bitc&ing and moaning in threads like this about something that needs to be at least as good as $30 boom boxes from Walmart -- hoping Tesla people are reading and using this input in their prioritization processes. Beyond AP1-AP2 Parity, unfortunately, the press seems focused if there is a new browser in 8.1, and now little else. I frankly don't care about the browser, and I doubt most owners do that use any amount of Infotainment functionality. Instead, give me an updated kernel with improved USB error recovery (if it's not there already), a bunch of Tesla-acknowledged bug fixes, and a few features to bring Tesla's Infotainment Basics closer to what everyone else provides in their lower-line models.

Yes, as an AP1 and USB kinda owner, I'm initially very disappointed with 8.1. It's far from being a WOW. Time for me to find and open a bottle of wine! Hopefully a little more time with 7.11.3 will reveal some cherries for us all. I look forward to what others find.

I choose to believe that some of the upcoming 8.1 iterations will have some of our much needed fixes.

8.1 really seems more like one of the 8.0 AP 2 updates than what was promised as 8.1.

The media player seems to have all of the same bugs that were introduced as "improvements" in the media player for 8.0.

I had the stuttering listening to a Bluetooth audio book yesterday - so it's not just USB playback.

The USB player still forgets the current song or position when returning to the car.

The "random" USB sequence is still the same - every time.

XM radio lost the station slider - and cars produced after 8.0 was released may not be able to get a station list.

Hopefully we'll see the real 8.1 release soon, with the promised media player fixes...

The "8.1" that was just released wasnt anything more than ap2 tweaks and nothing Elon eluded to prior as far as major overhaul. The only reason they used that moniker is so he wouldn't be called a liar and we wouldn't complain about another deadline missed.