Comprehensive USB Bug List

[BertL]

OF NOTE: Despite the benefits I’m still seeing with less tracks on my USB SSD (no rescans or unexpected reboots in 10 days), in the past two days two other previously reported problems have reoccurred. IOW, memory mgmt isn’t the only problem MP has, and reducing tracks on your USB device does not workaound all the problems there are.

— I have a long-standing intermittent issue when I leave my MS with USB music playing, and my HPWC (dual chargers) does a recharge, MP sometimes switches to the first non-USB favorite which in my case is an FM station. Otherwise, MP has been doing a good job continuing to play the same track as I lock/unlock my MS — ever since I switched away from FLAC to 100% MP3 VBS encoding. IMO there is definitely a bug with what I’d call “unscheduled top-off charges” that may cause MP to switch away from USB music if you were using it. I don’t have this problem when Supercharging or IIRC when a real scheduled charge via my HPWC takes place. (I know of no workaround to this MP bug if you keep your MS plugged-in, don’t drive for a couple days while your battery drains, and then MS tops itself off at some future scheduled window — but once you get back into your MS, unless you also have the “zero tracks” problem (see below) simply selecting USB music gets things going again without too much trouble.)

— The intermittent bug where the CID has rebooted itself or MP USB has chosen to rescan while you’re away from your MS, and upon returning to your MS you’re left with MP seeing the USB device, but reports zero tracks until a rescan is manually forced (unplug/plug-in USB device or reboot CID), still exists.

 

[BertL]

A New Anomaly within the Tesla Twilight Zone: Pause Breaks MP3 Workaround

Most of us are aware of the long-standing bug where MP USB does not always keep it's place when resuming playback of a track once you exit/reenter our MS. The workaround we've known for months is to use MP3 encoded files which don't exhibit this problem like e.g. FLAC do. I converted to 100% MP3 VBS files for use with MP USB when this workaround was found months ago, and have enjoyed my tracks resuming close to where they were upon reentry ever since ...but I have now found a way to break even that workaround. Sigh...

The following scenarios hopefully describe the situation:

Scenario 1 - OK
- Play MP3 (or another supported) file
- Pause the track (and stay in your MS)
- Resume playing the track
- MP USB continues playing the track where it left off - AS IT SHOULD BE. FINE.

Scenario 2 - FAIL
- Play FLAC or some other non-MP3 files
- Park/Exit/Lock; Reenter MS
- MP USB plays the track from the beginning - FAIL

Scenario 3 (Workaround for Scenario 2) - OK
- Play MP3 file
- Park/Exit/Lock; Reenter MS
- MP USB continues playing the track where it left off - GREAT

Scenario 4 - FAIL
- Play MP3 (or another supported) file
- Pause the track
- Park/Exit/Lock; Reenter MS
- You'll note MP now shows the track is back at 0:00 while still paused
- Resume playing the track
- MP USB plays the track from the beginning (and forgot where it was) - FAIL

IDK when this latest anomaly began -- perhaps it's only a variant of problems first observed in past builds that I just noticed -- but it's repeatable 100% of the time in my MS running 2018.28.5. NET: If you want to pick-up MP USB playback from where you were, use MP3 files (VBS for best quality) and either listen to the whole track or don't press pause before exiting your MS.

 

[neroden]

Gapless playback still doesn't ****ing work, and Tesla is still unable to play tracks in a folder in the correct order.

It's disgraceful, frankly. I could personally rewrite the music player in about two weeks and fix it all.

 

[f-stop]

updated observation on persistent flakiness of the USB music player...
my car is on firmware 2018.34.1

for the past week or so I've been playing a very small USB music collection: a mostly empty 2GB USB stick: 1 folder, 1 album/14 MP3 tracks, 4 or 5 tracks marked as Favorites. Total size of data <70MB.

Every once in a while when I get back into the car, all the previously set Favorites are wiped out. This happens without one of those random spontaneous rescans, they just vaporize with no apparent trigger. It's already happened a few times this week using this small music collection, re-adding a few favorites each time they get wiped out.

I previously noticed this several times with my regular ~60GB/6000+ track collection - it would at random times, poof! wipe out all the Favorites I previously saved - at times were maybe a couple hundred marked favorite tracks until I got tired of marking any because of this bug. Note that Favorites normally survive a manual reboot, so it's nothing to do with that - instead the USB player just randomly decides to forget all the Favorites - surely a bug, quite annoying.

Otherwise, I haven't done detailed testing but from what I can tell the USB media player seems to be misbehaving in its other usual ways, even with this very small music collection. As suggested previously there is likely some memory management issue made worse with large music collections, but at least some of the common bugs in the MP are still there even with small sets of files. Not holding my breath for any change/improvement with v9 apparently on the horizon.... (but hey, we're gonna get Asteroids. hooray )

 

[BertL]

updated observation on persistent flakiness of the USB music player...
my car is on firmware 2018.34.1

for the past week or so I've been playing a very small USB music collection: a mostly empty 2GB USB stick: 1 folder, 1 album/14 MP3 tracks, 4 or 5 tracks marked as Favorites. Total size of data <70MB.

Every once in a while when I get back into the car, all the previously set Favorites are wiped out. This happens without one of those random spontaneous rescans, they just vaporize with no apparent trigger. It's already happened a few times this week using this small music collection, re-adding a few favorites each time they get wiped out.

I previously noticed this several times with my regular ~60GB/6000+ track collection - it would at random times, poof! wipe out all the Favorites I previously saved - at times were maybe a couple hundred marked favorite tracks until I got tired of marking any because of this bug. Note that Favorites normally survive a manual reboot, so it's nothing to do with that - instead the USB player just randomly decides to forget all the Favorites - surely a bug, quite annoying.

Otherwise, I haven't done detailed testing but from what I can tell the USB media player seems to be misbehaving in its other usual ways, even with this very small music collection. As suggested previously there is likely some memory management issue made worse with large music collections, but at least some of the common bugs in the MP are still there even with small sets of files. Not holding my breath for any change/improvement with v9 apparently on the horizon.... (but hey, we're gonna get Asteroids. hooray )

Yeah, I too only upon rare occasion have this problem. When it happens it takes out all favorites from USB, FM, streaming sources, etc. IOW it's not tied to USB only, but apparently some larger MP problem as you suggest.

On a side note, I am approaching the 3-year mark owning my MS. Out of the blue, the Tesla Store called me the other evening saying they had some great deals on new Tesla and wanted to check how much I loved mine. My response was something to the effect of "I love the tech and not using dino fuel, and I love the Supercharger network. OTOH Tesla's continued lack of caring for their customers by not resolving long-standing basic firmware bugs in MP, that don't exist in my even older $30 boom box, has become a significant problem... especially when Tesla continues to prioritize creation of cute new Easter eggs and upcoming Atari games instead of first fixing what's broken. That, combined with problematic service where it recently took more than a year to get my driver's seat repaired, and that I'm approaching having a loaner battery pack on my car for almost 1 year now, I'm not sure I'll have another Tesla when the time comes." I think the person was a bit shocked and didn't have a lot more to say except "Thank you" and hung up. ;-)

 

[f-stop]

in my case, the MP loses all the favorite USB tracks, but interestingly enough, all my Slacker, Radio and TuneIn favorites are all still there, and none of those have ever been deleted by the system (knock on wood). The only odd thing with Slacker favorites I've noticed once or twice is that the MP changed the order of the favorites for some unknown reason

 

[aesculus]

Lets see what V9 brings us later this week or next. Some changes are noted for the MP but nothing about USB so far.

 

[ckessel]

FWIW, 2012 Model S and I used to be able to play flac files off a USB stick. I've been listening to audiobooks the last several months and haven't tried the USB stick until yesterday. It's a 64GB stick, maybe 40GB on it. Mostly the same as before, a few more albums.

It says "Loading...", gets to 100% and stalls there forever.

Telsa's USB support is worse than bad. They broke what little functionality I used to have. And my phone doesn't have enough memory to load all the music on it, so that's not an option either. I'm not sure what options are even available at this point to listen to my music collection.

Ahhh...I remember the days when I put down my deposit and the website said the Model S would have a built-in drive/memory for something like 3000 songs.

 

[BertL]

FWIW, 2012 Model S and I used to be able to play flac files off a USB stick. I've been listening to audiobooks the last several months and haven't tried the USB stick until yesterday. It's a 64GB stick, maybe 40GB on it. Mostly the same as before, a few more albums.

It says "Loading...", gets to 100% and stalls there forever.

Telsa's USB support is worse than bad. They broke what little functionality I used to have. And my phone doesn't have enough memory to load all the music on it, so that's not an option either. I'm not sure what options are even available at this point to listen to my music collection.

Ahhh...I remember the days when I put down my deposit and the website said the Model S would have a built-in drive/memory for something like 3000 songs.

If you’ve not tried them, first reboot your CID (foot on brake, hold both scroll wheels until the Tesla T appears and then let up on all 3). From there, double check you don’t have excessive Nav History and excessive phone contacts which could reduce available memory.

Then if you still have the loading problem, try exporting your music and/or podcasts in MP3. It is dramatically more stable in my testing. If Quality is of great concern, export in MP3 VBS with highest quality option enabled, and that will yield you something as good or better than FLAC, that is smaller in size, while not causing near the same number of problems I had with FLAC and the MP USB player.

Good luck.

 

[ckessel]

try exporting your music and/or podcasts in MP3.

Oh, I'm sure that'd work, but I'm not spending hordes of hours re-ripping hundreds of CDs... I guess I could convert the flacc to mp3, probably a way to do that, but I switched to flacc because I could hear the difference in the car and it was a format that worked...until Tesla broke it

 

[X Fan]

If you’ve not tried them, first reboot your CID (foot on brake, hold both scroll wheels until the Tesla T appears and then let up on all 3). From there, double check you don’t have excessive Nav History and excessive phone contacts which could reduce available memory.

Then if you still have the loading problem, try exporting your music and/or podcasts in MP3. It is dramatically more stable in my testing. If Quality is of great concern, export in MP3 VBS with highest quality option enabled, and that will yield you something as good or better than FLAC, that is smaller in size, while not causing near the same number of problems I had with FLAC and the MP USB player.

Good luck.

Bert-

I’d also suggest resetting trip a and b back to 0.

With my ap1 X, that step (was told by service) allowed me to significantly reduce reboots.

 

[thecloud]

I’d also suggest resetting trip a and b back to 0.

With my ap1 X, that step (was told by service) allowed me to significantly reduce reboots.

I noticed you put "(was told by service)" in parentheses. Did you observe whether it actually worked for you? I was under the impression that the advice to reset your trip meters was a misguided piece of folklore. Since one of the trip meters marks my car's lifetime mileage, I'd consider resetting it for no good reason to be a destructive action. You would probably save more memory by deleting entries in your nav history, assuming you made many entries there.

 

[X Fan]

I noticed you put "(was told by service)" in parentheses. Did you observe whether it actually worked for you? I was under the impression that the advice to reset your trip meters was a misguided piece of folklore. Since one of the trip meters marks my car's lifetime mileage, I'd consider resetting it for no good reason to be a destructive action. You would probably save more memory by deleting entries in your nav history, assuming you made many entries there.

It actually did; their suggestion was right.

 

[X Fan]

I've mentioned this before but with AP2+ rescans are a thing of the past....after 3 months with new X, when it does occur it's blazing fast.

 

[BertL]

I've mentioned this before but with AP2+ rescans are a thing of the past....after 3 months with new X, when it does occur it's blazing fast.

That's great news. I suspect the improvement you're seeing is only a result of the much faster processor and likely more memory that are part of the CID with newer vehicles. IOW, Tesla threw hardware at the problem which masks the issues, vs. really resolving the underlying problems that remain for those of us with original models until the firmware is redesigned and rewritten. If that theory is right, I bet you'd have similar issues to your old MS if you increased the number of tracks and metadata up to a level that pushed the limits of the new hardware.

 

[X Fan]

That's great news. I suspect the improvement you're seeing is only a result of the much faster processor and likely more memory that are part of the CID with newer vehicles. IOW, Tesla threw hardware at the problem which masks the issues, vs. really resolving the underlying problems that remain for those of us with original models until the firmware is redesigned and rewritten. If that theory is right, I bet you'd have similar issues to your old MS if you increased the number of tracks and metadata up to a level that pushed the limits of the new hardware.

I'm increasing tracks slowly but surely to validate....up to 7K now with a few hi-def FLACS (which surprisingly play vs. hiccuping in my AP1 vehicle).....of course, each increase requires Music Tag Editor to change metadata so it plays properly

 

[BertL]

Another FWIW:

I wrote about loosing MP favorites upon occasion. I since put 4 back for radio stations only. Today I picked up my MS from the SvC that was in for it's 3-yr annual service. New SW was awaiting installation (only 2018.36.2 with the PIN option, which I just finished installing after getting home), but interestingly, all my old favorites had mysteriously reappeared by just going to the SvC, including a couple from USB and Slacker. I've rebooted before going to the MS with no change to favorites, so only thing I can think of is somehow in the weird firmware logic, perhaps the download of new SW via the SvC caused a different logic path to be taken, that brought back the old favorites again. I'll never know for sure, but it sure is another oddity.

 

[f-stop]

FWIW additional observation about losing MP favorites. I mentioned earlier that even with my 2GB USB drive w/ only 14 MP3 tracks, with half a dozen favorites set - I noticed all the USB favorites occasionally getting wiped out, maybe happened 4 or 5 times in a couple week period.

I also mentioned I had NOT seen other favorites e.g. Slacker channels disappearing. But a correction: during these past couple weeks while observing what happens with a small USB drive, I now realize that SOME of my Slacker favorites occasionally go missing. It's happened in the past couple weeks 3 or 4 times now. Their disappearance did not necessarily coincide with USB favorites getting lost.

Interestingly, it seems like it's always the same handful of favorites that get un-favorited. For example, yesterday I re-favorited 4 or 5 stations that were forgotten. Later in the evening I switched to AM radio. This morning I noticed a bunch of the same Slacker favorites were lost again. Luckily most of the lost Slacker favorites were in the Recent tab because I had re-added them yesterday, so I could easily re-favorite them. Side note: it's really annoying there's not a simple way to sort the order of favorites. but we all know that's been a(nother) longstanding deficiency of the MP.

another random observation: a long time back perhaps in another thread I reported that I had a couple old Nav destinations that I could not delete manually. Maybe it's related to other stange memory-related problems many are experiencing. I would press&hold certain destinations in the history list to bring up the "X" on the right of the entry, press the X and the entry would go away. But the entry would reappear next time I opened the Nav. It only happened with a few specific entries, no obvious pattern as to which ones (some old, some recent) - just that certain ones would just persist even through a reboot. Others would delete just fine using this press-the-X method. I just accidentally discovered that you can also swipe-right on Nav history entry and that will delete it. Using the swipe-right method I was able to finally delete the few "stuck" Nav history entries. Perhaps just another sign of underlying weirdness in the CID coding...

 

[neroden]

Lets see what V9 brings us later this week or next. Some changes are noted for the MP but nothing about USB so far.

V9 is breakage, because it prevents us from having the camera and media player up at the same time. I've started a petition.
Petition to demand "camera on top, media player on bottom" be retained in UI

Don't expect them to fix anything about USB music; they'll probably break more things, like they usually do.

 

[neroden]

FWIW, 2012 Model S and I used to be able to play flac files off a USB stick. I've been listening to audiobooks the last several months and haven't tried the USB stick until yesterday. It's a 64GB stick, maybe 40GB on it. Mostly the same as before, a few more albums.

It says "Loading...", gets to 100% and stalls there forever.

Telsa's USB support is worse than bad. They broke what little functionality I used to have. And my phone doesn't have enough memory to load all the music on it, so that's not an option either. I'm not sure what options are even available at this point to listen to my music collection.

Bluntly, at this point we should start a lawsuit to get compensation. Tesla breaking the USB support is a *warranty issue* and they're refusing to honor the warranty. That's illegal and they owe us money.

Ahhh...I remember the days when I put down my deposit and the website said the Model S would have a built-in drive/memory for something like 3000 songs.

Yeah, I remember that too...