Comprehensive USB Bug List

[Legolad]

FWIW: although i wish Tesla would assign proper resources to optimize, my Patriot FLAC music library of over 5K songs/325 albums works well.

Key was coming up with a method to use Music Tag Editor to rationalize tags properly. Also, if you have multi-artist albums you need to assign a pseudu-name artist approach so that Tesla will recognize as part of an album (ie tony bennett duets I just tagged artist as tony bennett).

btw: BertL is the gold standard re: research on using FLAC music on a Tesla...

Thanks a lot, X Fan. I am heartened to see an active community on here that seems to care about decent audio.

Sounds like the Model X has the same tagging limitations as my Fiio X5 player, and I've already tagged my music to get around that, so it should be ok. I'm going to use Bluetooth anyway, just to avoid any new issues.

Of course, I'll keep up with the updates in case they improve the MP.

While we're on the subject, has anyone determined whether the USB ports in the Model X are USB 2.0 or 3.0?
Also, any idea on the max supported drive size?

 

[Legolad]

To answer the question about issues with gapless playback, the answer is yes. Here is a demonstration.

Thanks, thecloud.

 

[Legolad]

I would say that Tesla has pretty close to ZERO interest in fixing the MP issues. Most of the bugs discussed in this thread have been around for many months, or even a year or more. e.g. I've reported by email the Loading Error problem and other misc MP issues to them 3 times, and never even once received a polite auto-reply. I've even brought them up during a Service appointment with a specific request for followup reply, but no response.

Thanks f-stop. Sounds like they have a lot of work to do in this arena.

I have a lot of experience with issues similar to this in other players. The Pono had a LOT of issues. MThe Fiio X% has a lot too, though it's miles ahead of the the Pono. One of the best player firmwares I've ever seen is actually the open source RockBox firmware that I used on my old Sansa players. That was simply sublime.

Anyway, I'm now looking at new solutions and even considering buying a new play if I can find one with better software than the Fiio.

 

[BertL]

Thanks a lot, BertL. That's a lot of very helpful info. Sad. But Helpful.

I've ordered a Bluetooth transmitter and I've started looking at new players to see how things have changed since I bought my Fiio x5. Maybe there's a decent player with Bluetooth out there. I just wish I could determine whether the ModelX supports AptX.

Have you considered taking a player wit h features you’re considering to a Tesla Store and trying it in a physical MX while you wait? (I won’t suggest you buy one and then return it after the test, but hey, that’s just me. ). Talk to the Store folks and see if you can try a player in one of their vehicles. I found the store folks very accommodating, especially during non-peak times when the store isn’t swamped. Good luck.

 

[Legolad]

I do the twitters, so I posted this:
@elonmusk My 7-year-old $50 Sansa MP3 player with free, open-source, fan-coded Rockbox firmware has a better playback UI than my brand new $100,000 Model X. I know AP is critical, but so are my tunes. Please fix this. Or maybe enable a USB-Audio port for better players?

 

[Legolad]

Have you considered taking a player wit h features you’re considering to a Tesla Store and trying it in a physical MX while you wait? (I won’t suggest you buy one and then return it after the test, but hey, that’s just me. ). Talk to the Store folks and see if you can try a player in one of their vehicles. I found the store folks very accommodating, especially during non-peak times when the store isn’t swamped. Good luck.

Yep. I'm not shy. That's on my to-do list.

 

[Alkettory]

Also, any idea on the max supported drive size?

As you add more tracks, "loading" times go up. The MP tries to scan the whole USB drive and load all of the metadata into RAM. At some point, this memory consumption starts to compete with other functions, such as navigation. So the more tracks you have, the flakier things get.

I originally had a USB drive with 40,000 tracks, and the MP spent literally half of its time with the USB drive in a "loading" state, because the memory manager kept purging the metadata from RAM, and the MP kept reloading it.

I finally set up a USB drive with 5,000 tracks, and the MP has been rock solid ever since. No "loading" messages, no random source switches, and it always picks up exactly where it left off when I exit then reenter the vehicle.

 

[BertL]

As you add more tracks, "loading" times go up. The MP tries to scan the whole USB drive and load all of the metadata into RAM. At some point, this memory consumption starts to compete with other functions, such as navigation. So the more tracks you have, the flakier things get.

I originally had a USB drive with 40,000 tracks, and the MP spent literally half of its time with the USB drive in a "loading" state, because the memory manager kept purging the metadata from RAM, and the MP kept reloading it.

I finally set up a USB drive with 5,000 tracks, and the MP has been rock solid ever since. No "loading" messages, no random source switches, and it always picks up exactly where it left off when I exit then reenter the vehicle.

Right. IMHO, each of our sweet spots is different because of all the variables and Tesla not implementing firm limits for them like other mfgrs do, but for me, a little more than 7K tracks is where substantially more unexpected problems begin.

 

[SoccerMan94043]

One of the major issues I've had (and mentioned in the past) is the screen playing when jumping around to different songs, from the usb drive, when in random mode; after one or several songs, it would eventually start spinning until it timed out and I have to start the random list over again.

After installing 10.4 (the MCU speed update), it seems like this is solved. I need to do more testing, but after jumping around to 30 or so songs, I had no problems.

 

[SoccerMan94043]

I ran into the freeze issue again this morning on my commute. I had forwarded through 10 or so songs and I got the spin of death. But it stopped much more quickly and I was able to reload it and play the song again much more quickly.

 

[SoccerMan94043]

After much more playin... it's as broken as always

 

[f-stop]

I ran into the freeze issue again this morning on my commute. I had forwarded through 10 or so songs and I got the spin of death. But it stopped much more quickly and I was able to reload it and play the song again much more quickly.

When you say "freeze issue" / "spin of death", are you referring to the problem where it also displays "Loading error" on the USB music player screen?

if so, yes that's a longstanding and well-documented-in-this-thread bug that Tesla seems to be happy to continue to ignore - even after I let them know there's an interesting side effect of the Loading Errors that causes all in-car audio alerts to be muted for 3 seconds (so, turns signal clicks, autopilot warning chimes, etc). These USB loading errors still happen in my car with firmware 2018.6.1

If that's the problem you're having, note that it doesn't seem to happen with MP3 music tracks stored on the USB so that's one workaround. As I reported earlier in this thread, my testing shows that if you play .M4A / AAC tracks you can be guaranteed to reproduce frequent Loading Errors on those tracks. If you're shuffling with a mix of MP3 tracks among those then that might be why you only see the problem occasionally

 

[SoccerMan94043]

When you say "freeze issue" / "spin of death", are you referring to the problem where it also displays "Loading error" on the USB music player screen?

if so, yes that's a longstanding and well-documented-in-this-thread bug that Tesla seems to be happy to continue to ignore - even after I let them know there's an interesting side effect of the Loading Errors that causes all in-car audio alerts to be muted for 3 seconds (so, turns signal clicks, autopilot warning chimes, etc). These USB loading errors still happen in my car with firmware 2018.6.1

If that's the problem you're having, note that it doesn't seem to happen with MP3 music tracks stored on the USB so that's one workaround. As I reported earlier in this thread, my testing shows that if you play .M4A / AAC tracks you can be guaranteed to reproduce frequent Loading Errors on those tracks. If you're shuffling with a mix of MP3 tracks among those then that might be why you only see the problem occasionally

That is indeed the problem (I also reported it early in this thread)... my thought was it was either a memory leak or a performance issue, so I was hoping the MCU firmware upgrade might help (and initially it looked like it did). But it's still bad.

I'll try converting everything to MP3 and see how that goes.

 

[f-stop]

That is indeed the problem (I also reported it early in this thread)... my thought was it was either a memory leak or a performance issue, so I was hoping the MCU firmware upgrade might help (and initially it looked like it did). But it's still bad.

I'll try converting everything to MP3 and see how that goes.

fyi I can easily reproduce the problem using a small capacity USB stick only containing a handful of AAC tracks, in multiple cars. I cannot reproduce with only MP3. So I don’t believe this particular bug is memory related, instead it seems something changed in the audio codec firmware when this bug surfaced after one of last year's updates.

instead of converting your whole music library to MP3 just yet, here's a quick and easy test. Format a new USB flash drive and put two folders on it - one with about a dozen MP3 tracks, the other folder with a dozen .M4A/AAC tracks. In the music player, select play by Folder, then shuffle play. I'm betting you'll be able to play the MP3 folder all week long with no trouble, but if you play the AAC folder you'll get constant/frequent loading errors.

 

[X Fan]

I wonder if the new intel unit will improve usb functionality?

I’m up to 5500 tracks on ap1 X and it’s hiccuping more

 

[MP3Mike]

Well the Model 3 doesn't support AAC so maybe that was their solution.

 

[f-stop]

Well the Model 3 doesn't support AAC so maybe that was their solution.

do you know if they officially state this somewhere? Just curious. in the M3 owner's manual I saw recently online, it only says: "You can play audio files from a USB-connected flash drive or from a Bluetooth-connected device (like a phone)." Identical generic statement in the Model S owner's manual - there's seems to be no specific limitation mentioned anywhere other than only FAT32 formatted devices are supported.

Part of the problem is that I don't think they define anywhere what's supported and what's not. Meanwhile things that used to work for 2 years (i.e. AAC) suddenly stopped working last year. Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if someday their "solution" to the problem would be to drop support for anything other than MP3, but it's frustrating that Tesla neither acknowledges there's a problem nor says what the media player actually supports.

 

[MP3Mike]

do you know if they officially state this somewhere? Just curious. in the M3 owner's manual I saw recently online, it only says: "You can play audio files from a USB-connected flash drive or from a Bluetooth-connected device (like a phone)." Identical generic statement in the Model S owner's manual - there's seems to be no specific limitation mentioned anywhere other than only FAT32 formatted devices are supported.

No official statement, just reports from everyone that has tried that it doesn't work.

I haven't seen if anyone with the new Intel based MCU in a S/X has tried AAC files yet...

 

[BertL]

FWIW, I just re-tried my aging test USB stick in my MS running 2018.6.1, and found the same situation with Apple Lossless and AAC formats as I've had for more than a year since I started doing more in-depth testing of what seems to work and not. Nothing IMHO has changed in that timeframe.

While it's not Tesla's problem per se, complicating matters when discussing and to know what works and not, is that while these music formats are sometimes talked about as if they are all one thing, AAC is technically a different encoder from Apple Lossless, and you can't presume what the encoder really is just because you see a .m4a filetype. More robust players have to open-up the file, look inside and decide how to decode the music content within, or we have to use a utilitiy to do the same on our Mac or PC to figure it out -- meaning, Tesla may or may not support each of the many different variations, and playback results can vary because of the many combinations. In any case, the three variants being recently discussed operate this way from my quick tests and review a short while ago:

• AAC (.aac) plays back OK. (To confuse things, the file extension may also be .m4a, as well as the encoded music can be variable or different fixed bit rates, with a couple other options to boot. I've not tried each of the variants.)
• Apple Lossy aka Apple AAC (.m4a) plays back OK. (To confuse things this can be variable or different fixed bit rates. I've not tried each of the variants.)
• Apple Lossless aka ALAC (.m4a) scans in fine, but creates a Loading Error upon playback. IMHO it's a failure in Tesla's outdated code or library that is reading the .m4a extension and tags in as if all should work to the end-user, but then won't handle playback as it should, or if there is some odd reason Tesla chose not to support this format, superior programming from an end-user perspective would be to flatly ignore the file and not pull it into the interface in the first place. Either way, to me ALAC failure remains a long-standing Tesla BUG.

I personally maintain my 1200+ CD collection ripped in my master music library as ALAC (.m4a), since Apple made their once proprietary format open source and royalty-free over 7 years ago, and it works natively in iTunes and other Apple players including Airplay, along with nearly every current player I've used except for Tesla's MP. Before I found more recently that MP3 VBS produces less oddities for me in MP, I converted my targeted music to FLAC for playback in my MS to workaround Tesla's shortcomings. (Check-out my dBpoweramp post above towards the end of the trouble-shooting section for a list of other supported formats I've found.)

 

[ozweepay]

When I got my Tesla 2.5 years ago, the most frustrating bug, by far, was that listening to USB audio books and podcasts was nearly impossible because the car's player would not keep its position after power off. In fact, sometimes it resets to the beginning of the podcast while I'm driving.

I was so certain that this would be fixed in a software patch within a month or two. But it has now been 2.5 years and despite USB playback updates, the problem is still there.

My lease is up in 5 months. I don't plan to get another Tesla... it's terrifying to think my life is in the hands of a car company who can't get something right that is so basic.