Comprehensive USB Bug List

[hiroshiy]

Tracks are now correctly restarting where they left off, every time I reenter my MS.
I've had one week of zero rescans or loading errors -- which has not happened in a very long time.
...and it's not because of a Tesla firmware change, but because of a choice I decided to make.

BACKGROUND

While I swore off doing another round of complete USB MP testing as I've reported here several times, I remain convinced that Tesla's poor management of constrained memory conditions is a primary reason some of us have more or less USB playback problems than others. It's why for more than a year, I have gone to such extremes extracting less than 7K tracks from my curated master music library of primarily ALAC (AAC Lossless) tracks into FLAC. I then let my Mac spend hours processing those tracks to remove extraneous tagging, standardize Album Art into JPG-only that is roughly the same size as the largest image displayed anywhere within the MP UI, and apply a few other transformations to resolve lack of MP functionality where I am able. Except for testing, I've used FLAC for all my MP tracks since I took delivery of my MS nearly 2 years ago: I had the space on my large USB/SSD devices, conversion time from ALAC is super-fast, and I get the best possible quality going into MP that I can provide. The result isn't perfect as I still have my Tesla Twilight Zone moments, but my problems have been minimized despite long-outstanding MP bugs and missing features.

We've discussed here before that ID3 tagging has created a number of variants over time, but those variants also multiply as different codecs are used -- e.g. MP3 tagging isn't 100% the same as what happens with FLAC for the same content. Album Art also has unlimited possibilities on sizes, image compression formats, etc. which I've discussed in posts before. I personally have not found any issue using any ID3 variation up to ID3V2.4 in my MS, but I believe we've proven in this thread more than once, that ill-structured tagging can make MP go berserk or cause more intermittent failures. The problem with that is the damage could have been done years ago inside your source tracks without you even realizing it, and the error may not be apparent in all players. To me, ID3 tags just open up a lot of possible places where any media player can fail if it's not designed assuming an owner may give it tracks with errors to begin with.​

MY LATEST AH-HA MOMENT

I have not been able to get @f-stop's post a few weeks ago out of my head suggesting filetype (aka "codec") is yet another variable in the equation. Thanks @f-stop! Beyond specific testing I have documented here in the past, I have had nothing but 100% FLAC in my MS for daily use ...but what if I could improve my not-so-perfect MP environment even further?​

THE NET

After a quick test to ensure MP would handle the output, I reran my dBpoweramp conversion process against my same 6,708 ALAC tracks with all the same transformation options I've been using, except instead of FLAC, I encoded all tracks as MP3 VBR -V0 (aka, Variable Bit Rate with highest quality).

After one week, the result is sound quality where I can't tell a difference from my FLAC files -- especially with road noise -- and now whenever I get into my MS, MP resumes playing the same track from the same spot it left off, every single time without any interaction on my part. No pause, no funny business. It has worked 100% of the time with short errands, deeper sleep, and through a scheduled charging cycle. I also have had no unexpected rescans or loading errors in this same week -- although given how intermittent both of these problems are, I am not ready to declare success on either of these concerns.​

CONCLUSION

As some of us have thought for a long time, MP3 seems to be more of a sweet spot for how MP best operates. I am now personally convinced that is the case -- at least with firmware 2017.32 9ea02cb I am currently running. I still believe the Tesla Engineers that design and test MP are mostly using small numbers of MP3 files, with sparse ID3 tagging and probably a single piece of art for a complete album, vs what some of us "music enthusiasts" have with multi-disc albums, compilations, highly curated and extensive ID3 tagging, perhaps different art for different tracks, and a desire to use lossless codecs with a large number of tracks from our collection.

Converting to MP3 VBR has become my new standard. Some of you can debate if you believe MP3 VBR is of sufficient quality in your MS. (Note I am not suggesting use of lesser CBR or ABR targets. I admit I'm surprised Tesla's code supports MP3 VBR as it's more complex and not something every MP3 player will handle, but it works -- probably because of tag-along code in open source libraries.) While it does not require any effort on my part except to pay the energy bill, the conversion from a lossless format to MP3 VBR, with the rest of the dBpoweramp transformation I do to hopefully reduce CID memory usage is highly compute intensive. For my 6,708 ALAC tracks, once I have a copy extracted from my iTunes Library, it takes a whopping 53 hours for my 4.0GHz quad core to accomplish the task.​

- - - - - - - - - -

BERT'S dBpoweramp MEDIA PLAYER 8.1 WORKAROUND 09-17-2017

It's been nearly a year since I posted the last version of this nearly 1,000 posts upthread. For those that didn't catch that and care about an overview of the transformations I make on my master music library files for use in my Tesla MS, and the basic steps I use with dBpoweramp -- either the Mac or Windows version -- to automate most of the effort, here you go. I have no affiliation with the products themselves.

My settings accomplish the following:

• Use a temporary directory containing copies of the source audio files I want to have converted for use in my MS
• Puts the contents of ALBUMARTIST into TRACKARTIST on every track
• Changes all dBpoweramp-supported Album Art to JPG, and reduces it’s size to a maximum 300x300
• Changes TRACKTITLE to “DISCNUMBER-TRACKNUMBER TRACKTITLE” on every track
• Performs Volume Normalize analysis against each track, physically changing the contents of the track copy so the Tesla driver does not have to fiddle as much with the volume level as soft/loud parts of a track, or across tracks of disparate albums, are played.
  • This performs a methodical analysis of each track’s volume, looking across 6000ms windows of time and adjusting the volume up/down just as you would trying to keep relative playback volume closer to the same during very soft and loud parts of the track. This seems to most closely emulate what I know as ASL or Automatic Sound Leveling options that are done real-time in other vehicles I’ve owned, except here it’s physically preprocessed into a copy of every track for playback later in my Tesla. I'm a pretty critical listener, and do not find this processing takes away from my content enjoyment or introduces some unnatural annoyance. The side benefit is the relative volume level, as you switch from USB Media Source to e.g. FM, is pretty close to being the same, which in my experience isn't what happens otherwise.
  • THE BIG DRAWBACK is this takes an extraordinary amount of hands-off compute time to accomplish. It increases the conversion time by 5-16X. If you don't want to use it, just delete the Volume Normalize line from the DSP Effects once you load my settings.

• Converts every source audio file of varying encoding types to MP3 VBR -V 0 Quality
• Places the newly created version of the MP3 files into a 2-level directory structure: One folder off of the root for each album with related tracks inside, correctly handling track sequencing and multi-disc albums (assuming you have them tagged correctly in your master library to being with).

The process

• Extract files you want to convert from your master library to a temporary directory on your Mac or PC. (I use "Export for iTunes" available on the Mac App Store.)
• Start dBpoweramp Music Converter
  • Point it at that temporary directory you just made and filled with source tracks
  • Click the Convert icon
  • On the conversion menu:
    • Encoding: MP3 (Lame)
      • Target: Quality (VBR)
      • Move the slider all the way to the right (high quality / larger file)
      • Encoding: Normal
    • Output To: Select "Edit Dynamic Naming" in the dropdown
      • Base Location: Specify the folder you want to put the converted tracks into
      • Dynamic Naming: [album] - [album artist]/[disc]-[track] [title]
        • If you have a real need and think through the implications, change that directory structure as you desire for use in Folder View, noting pros and cons of too shallow and too deep folder structures discussed elsewhere in this thread, and implications that may have on Tesla's other Views if you choose to use them
    • Unzip, then Load the attached DSP Effects / Actions. (Don't be concerned the filename says "FLAC". Your encoding selection above is what counts.)
    • Click Convert and you’re on your way. Let your computer do it’s thing and go do something more productive.

I suggest you give the process a try with a small number of tracks from various albums to see how it works in your MS. Make changes to fit your own needs and desire, then let the Converter rip against your larger set of tracks. Oh, and if you change the settings, remember to save the DSP Effects so you don't have to go through the trial-and-error again one day.​

Enjoy!

Hi, @BertL , it seems it's time to ask the expert.

I think we discussed this long before but I have a few albums that are divided into multiple albums in the media player. I remember it might be caused by ALBUMARTIST having comma separated artist names. Could you tell me how I can put V.A. into ALBUMARTIST if there's comma there?

 

[iffatall]

Hi, @BertL , it seems it's time to ask the expert.

I think we discussed this long before but I have a few albums that are divided into multiple albums in the media player. I remember it might be caused by ALBUMARTIST having comma separated artist names. Could you tell me how I can put V.A. into ALBUMARTIST if there's comma there?

Tesla is currently ignoring the ALBUMARTIST tag. All songs in your album must have the same ALBUM and the same ARTIST (and the same YEAR?) tags in order to be categorized into one album right now.

[Correct expected behavior: Categorize albums by <ALBUM, ALBUMARTIST> tag pair. But it doesn't work that way currently.]

 

[aesculus]

Tesla is currently ignoring the ALBUMARTIST tag. All songs in your album must have the same ALBUM and the same ARTIST (and the same YEAR?) tags in order to be categorized into one album right now.

Yeah this totally sucks and is my biggest complaint of the Media Player. Makes many of my albums worthless.

And then if you play by folder the order is all wrong unless you purposefully go out of your way to change the file name by prepending a order digit to the front of the file name.

 

[BertL]

Hi, @BertL , it seems it's time to ask the expert.

I think we discussed this long before but I have a few albums that are divided into multiple albums in the media player. I remember it might be caused by ALBUMARTIST having comma separated artist names. Could you tell me how I can put V.A. into ALBUMARTIST if there's comma there?

Right, as @iffatall says, it’s the combination of ALBUM and (track) ARTIST that MP seems to use to distinguish between unique albums. That isn’t right ID3-wise (Tesla should be using ALBUM+ALBUMARTIST), but is what it is with our Tesla’s. You need exact matches of both fields across tracks for them to appear as the same album in MP. A couple of other thoughts as you set out making changes:

1. Be sure you don’t accidentally have a space at the end of some tracks meta fields and not others... it will look right to your eyes, but not sort correctly with Tesla’s logic. Upper and lower case make a difference too.
2. I circumvent Tesla’s bug using ARTIST in lieu of ALBUMARTIST, in my conversion scripting when I create my Tesla SSD, by replacing ARTIST with the contents of ALBUMARTIST in every track from my master iTunes library. I loose perhaps a little bit of artist granularity, but it reduces a lot of memory and allows me to use the ALBUM interface in MP when I want to.
3. When you make your changes, be sure to change a higher level directory name on your USB device above where your tracks get metadata renaming. Then, if I were you, also reboot your CID for good measure just in case. I’ve not tried it in at least a couple newer firmware releases, but we have gone through some code drops where MP seems to stubbornly remember some metadata changes across USB device removal, rescan and even CID reboot — changing USB directory and track filenames will help MP re-read the metadata inside your tracks again.

Good luck.

 

[Legolad]

Hey folks,

Just ordered my Model X instead of a Model 3 after taking a test drive. I'm looking forward to the new car this June.

I have a few questions, if you don't mind:

1. Have any of you tried using a standalone Bluetooth transmitter with a good lossless music player? If so, which transmitter?
2. Based on all the posts in this forum, is the consensus that Tesla are only mildly interested in fixing the Media Player issues?
3. Assuming that I tag my music well (consistent Album and Artist tags and leading zeroes on track numbers) can I expect the sorting/grouping to work well otherwise?
4. Are there any issues with gapless playback?

After reading this forum, I am not looking forward to the audio experience. I was pretty surprised to learn there was no 3.5 mm stereo port. I was further surprised to learn that I wouldn't be able to connect a nice media player via USB and control my audio that way.

While I usually have a cell signal, there are plenty of places in Atlanta that have dead zones. Also, any time I get outside of Atlanta, steady signal can be a real challenge, especially in the mountains. That's why I have a nice lossless media player with a TON of storage. I'm a huge music lover and I have an enormous collection, all in FLAC format so I can hear what I want, when I want.

Unfortunately, while players like mine feature excellent sound quality and much larger storage than a phone, they don't usually include Bluetooth. I'm glad to see Tesla has slowly been improving the Media Player, but I fear I will be disappointed in the this part of the car. That's a bit of a shocker for me given the $100k price tag.

 

[BertL]

Hey folks,

Just ordered my Model X instead of a Model 3 after taking a test drive. I'm looking forward to the new car this June.

I have a few questions, if you don't mind:

1. Have any of you tried using a standalone Bluetooth transmitter with a good lossless music player? If so, which transmitter?
2. Based on all the posts in this forum, is the consensus that Tesla are only mildly interested in fixing the Media Player issues?
3. Assuming that I tag my music well (consistent Album and Artist tags and leading zeroes on track numbers) can I expect the sorting/grouping to work well otherwise?
4. Are there any issues with gapless playback?

After reading this forum, I am not looking forward to the audio experience. I was pretty surprised to learn there was no 3.5 mm stereo port. I was further surprised to learn that I wouldn't be able to connect a nice media player via USB and control my audio that way.

While I usually have a cell signal, there are plenty of places in Atlanta that have dead zones. Also, any time I get outside of Atlanta, steady signal can be a real challenge, especially in the mountains. That's why I have a nice lossless media player with a TON of storage. I'm a huge music lover and I have an enormous collection, all in FLAC format so I can hear what I want, when I want.

Unfortunately, while players like mine feature excellent sound quality and much larger storage than a phone, they don't usually include Bluetooth. I'm glad to see Tesla has slowly been improving the Media Player, but I fear I will be disappointed in the this part of the car. That's a bit of a shocker for me given the $100k price tag.

Congrats on your MX order. My thoughts:

1. Have not tried it, but in theory should work. Streaming from iPhone (and Android from what I read) works for the most part using built-in bluetooth, so I see no reason another device with current bluetooth profiles shouldn't work... The challenge in that regard is Tesla does not document what levels of Bluetooth are actually supported, so it's trial-and-error to see what may or may not operate -- just as some of us have done to figure out USB Media Player (MP). You may have read in other threads that some owners have had problems with bluetooth connectivity with older smartphones and a few seem to be having problems when the newer Apple Watch 3 LTE is enabled (mine works fine, but I suspect the problem may be with newer MS that perhaps have different hardware in the CID than my "old" MS from 2015 does.)

2. Right. Elon does not see MP as a priority -- far from the level that some of us view Infotainment as being an important part and differentiator in our rides ... e.g. M3 doesn't even have AM radio, and didn't have USB or even FM when the first public models shipped. Despite lots of reports to Tesla, most problems have gone on deaf ears. Some problems have been fixed and were subsequently broken again. There have been many promises, but most have not been followed-through on -- certainly in any reasonable period of time (even years). I read a reported recent tweet from Elon that MP fixes are coming, but most of us I'm sure are like me and not holding our breath.

3. Tagging isn't the only challenge depending on how you want to access your music using the file structure or built-in menus. Hopefully we have a new level of MP USB before your new MX arrives, so I won't try to rewrite all the detail here as there are many points and combinations... it's above in my and many other posts if you want to search for it now. Net is, you can reduce some of the oddities with a bunch of workarounds -- the combinations make a difference how well MP works for different owners. I've automated most of the conversion work using dBpoweramp and documented how to do that in detail upthread. Some of the workarounds involve how files are structured and named on the USB device, the format of the file itself (FLAC works, but not as well e.g. as VBS), the quality and amount of tagging you have (aka memory usage), Album Artist is not used by MP as it should be, etc., etc. It's really rather a mess, and sort of points-out that the design/testing is not being done by real music enthusiasts, especially as Tesla elects not to document anything of what IS supported.

4. Gapless playback is a long-standing requirement. There is no current option within MP to do it.

I agree Tesla's lack of physical music player capability is a drawback, especially when USB Music has so many issues... I came into my MS more than 2 years ago knowing I wouldn't have CD's, couldn't use my large iPod Classics that I used to have in my Lexus and MBZ containing 100% of my purchased music tracks, albums and playlists -- most that have been ripped into lossless format -- and suspecting Elon would not implement Apple CarPlay... hoping I could use copies of my music on a USB stick and be satisfied enough. I went so far as to build a simple stick with a couple dozen tracks and took it to a Tesla Store before I ordered -- I was pretty satisfied then. The problem was my "mini test cases" were far from reality and set me up for a major disappointment within a couple days after delivery as I tried to use a USB device with most of my music. I've fought with Infotainment bugs, trying to figure out what is and is not supported, and developing workarounds ever since -- most of that is documented in this thread. It's sad, as a handful of programmers could have resolved most of the problems and lack of functionality long ago ... but IMO as long as people keep buying new Tesla's with the warts they have, disappointed owners create their own workarounds or just abandon trying to use USB Music accepting the problems, and there is no negative press to sort of force Elon's hand to improve things, MP and Infotainment are not treated as a priority ... but Elon says yet another new Easter Egg will be provided very soon. {:-(

 

[X Fan]

Hey folks,

Just ordered my Model X instead of a Model 3 after taking a test drive. I'm looking forward to the new car this June.

I have a few questions, if you don't mind:

1. Have any of you tried using a standalone Bluetooth transmitter with a good lossless music player? If so, which transmitter?
2. Based on all the posts in this forum, is the consensus that Tesla are only mildly interested in fixing the Media Player issues?
3. Assuming that I tag my music well (consistent Album and Artist tags and leading zeroes on track numbers) can I expect the sorting/grouping to work well otherwise?
4. Are there any issues with gapless playback?

After reading this forum, I am not looking forward to the audio experience. I was pretty surprised to learn there was no 3.5 mm stereo port. I was further surprised to learn that I wouldn't be able to connect a nice media player via USB and control my audio that way.

While I usually have a cell signal, there are plenty of places in Atlanta that have dead zones. Also, any time I get outside of Atlanta, steady signal can be a real challenge, especially in the mountains. That's why I have a nice lossless media player with a TON of storage. I'm a huge music lover and I have an enormous collection, all in FLAC format so I can hear what I want, when I want.

Unfortunately, while players like mine feature excellent sound quality and much larger storage than a phone, they don't usually include Bluetooth. I'm glad to see Tesla has slowly been improving the Media Player, but I fear I will be disappointed in the this part of the car. That's a bit of a shocker for me given the $100k price tag.

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...

 

[thecloud]

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

 

[hiroshiy]

Right, as @iffatall says, it’s the combination of ALBUM and (track) ARTIST that MP seems to use to distinguish between unique albums. That isn’t right ID3-wise (Tesla should be using ALBUM+ALBUMARTIST), but is what it is with our Tesla’s. You need exact matches of both fields across tracks for them to appear as the same album in MP. A couple of other thoughts as you set out making changes:

1. Be sure you don’t accidentally have a space at the end of some tracks meta fields and not others... it will look right to your eyes, but not sort correctly with Tesla’s logic. Upper and lower case make a difference too.
2. I circumvent Tesla’s bug using ARTIST in lieu of ALBUMARTIST, in my conversion scripting when I create my Tesla SSD, by replacing ARTIST with the contents of ALBUMARTIST in every track from my master iTunes library. I loose perhaps a little bit of artist granularity, but it reduces a lot of memory and allows me to use the ALBUM interface in MP when I want to.
3. When you make your changes, be sure to change a higher level directory name on your USB device above where your tracks get metadata renaming. Then, if I were you, also reboot your CID for good measure just in case. I’ve not tried it in at least a couple newer firmware releases, but we have gone through some code drops where MP seems to stubbornly remember some metadata changes across USB device removal, rescan and even CID reboot — changing USB directory and track filenames will help MP re-read the metadata inside your tracks again.

Good luck.

Hi, @BertL , thanks for your help as always. I found what it actually happened to my files.

In fact, I have two compilation albums that are split into multiple albums in the Tesla media player. I was assuming that there are multiple artist names in ALBUMARTIST ID3 tag, but I was wrong. Upon further investigation it seems these two albums didn't contain ALBUMARTIST tag from the beginning. When I apply your convert script (that I love very much), these albums now have ALBUMARTIST = Unknown, and this seemed to cause album split. When I manually wrote ALBUMARTIST = Various Artists in all songs in these two albums and have dbPoweramp Batch Converter convert, the resulting songs now have correct ALBUMARTIST = Various Artists and played OK on Tesla.
That said, it seems Tesla doesn't like ALBUMARTIST = Unknown?? I'm confused...

 

[BertL]

Hi, @BertL , thanks for your help as always. I found what it actually happened to my files.

In fact, I have two compilation albums that are split into multiple albums in the Tesla media player. I was assuming that there are multiple artist names in ALBUMARTIST ID3 tag, but I was wrong. Upon further investigation it seems these two albums didn't contain ALBUMARTIST tag from the beginning. When I apply your convert script (that I love very much), these albums now have ALBUMARTIST = Unknown, and this seemed to cause album split. When I manually wrote ALBUMARTIST = Various Artists in all songs in these two albums and have dbPoweramp Batch Converter convert, the resulting songs now have correct ALBUMARTIST = Various Artists and played OK on Tesla.
That said, it seems Tesla doesn't like ALBUMARTIST = Unknown?? I'm confused...

Hummm. That's strange. I'm glad you found the problem. I'll see if I can recreate the "Unknown" issue myself, and if so, will then attempt to come up with something to fix or workaround the issue. If I'm able to, I'll post back here. Until then, I'm glad your manual override worked! Take care.

 

[f-stop]

not sure if this is related to the issue mentioned by @hiroshiy but coincidentally just the other day I found a few albums on my USB which strangely had " - UNKNOWN" appended to the album title, both in the tags and on the enclosing folder - I had previously also used the script from @BertL to convert everything (thx again). The original source files had ARTIST but no ALBUMARTIST tag, however I had many other albums without ALBUMARTIST tags before the script conversion that didn't get their album name appended with " - UNKNOWN". Not a big deal, since only a few albums affected and I just manually corrected the album names.

meanwhile, on this:

2. Based on all the posts in this forum, is the consensus that Tesla are only mildly interested in fixing the Media Player issues?

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.

 

[BertL]

Hi, @BertL , thanks for your help as always. I found what it actually happened to my files.

In fact, I have two compilation albums that are split into multiple albums in the Tesla media player. I was assuming that there are multiple artist names in ALBUMARTIST ID3 tag, but I was wrong. Upon further investigation it seems these two albums didn't contain ALBUMARTIST tag from the beginning. When I apply your convert script (that I love very much), these albums now have ALBUMARTIST = Unknown, and this seemed to cause album split. When I manually wrote ALBUMARTIST = Various Artists in all songs in these two albums and have dbPoweramp Batch Converter convert, the resulting songs now have correct ALBUMARTIST = Various Artists and played OK on Tesla.
That said, it seems Tesla doesn't like ALBUMARTIST = Unknown?? I'm confused...

@hiroshiy, I've played around with this quite a while this morning. Here's what I found:

• Just for clarity, let's first remember, Tesla's MP doesn't use ALBUMARTIST as it should. It uses ARTIST instead. So, it's "my" dBpoweramp conversion settings that are really copying your source ALBUMARTIST tag data into ARTIST for use with MP.
  • NOTE: While my settings strip out any tags that MP does not currently use (to perhaps save memory or just a bit of CID processing time), I do purposely leave ALBUMARTIST in the converted tracks on the hope that one day Tesla will fix their design flaw, and anyone that has used "my" conversion settings will have a USB device with tracks that will work properly on the first day that new firmware becomes available.
• I made a number of test VBS tracks with "Unknown" in varying combinations as ARTIST, ALBUMARTIST, TITLE, and ALBUM. I tried both the original hand-tagged test files, as well as ran them through "my" dBpoweramp conversion process. My MS (2018.6.1) accepted and played them all without any problem, duplication or unexpected breaking-up of albums.
• Looking back at my dBpoweramp DSP settings logic, I have always had it place the word "Unknown" into the converted version of either ARTIST or ALBUMARTIST if the tag is non-existent or blank in the source track. I revalidated this morning (dBpoweramp for Mac V16.2) that if that change is made by my processing logic, physical file naming will also show "Unknown" as it should.
• I did find a couple obscure scenarios where my conversion logic could fail and end-up producing a bad physical filename or where ALBUMARTIST or ARTIST get out-of-sync with one another -- which could cause album splitting or other anomalies as you found. I won't bore you with detail, but non-existent tags or blanks in the source ALBUM, TITLE, TRACK (number), ALBUMARTIST, or ARTIST could be the culprit.

So, I can't explain why your MS isn't liking "Unknown" in the ARTIST tag, as mine seems to be OK with it. Regardless, I'm providing an updated "1a" version of my dBpoweramp settings that will hopefully resolve this for you in the future, and I've hopefully made the conversion logic more robust for everyone if critical tag data is missing in the source track. How to use the attached settings file is the same as I described upthread last November.

V1A CHANGE LOG:

• CHANGE: If ARTIST or ALBUMARTIST is non-existent or blank in the source version of any track, "Various Artists" (in lieu of "Unknown") is now inserted in the converted track tag and used for any file naming purposes.
• ADDED: If ALBUM or TITLE is non-existent or blank in the source version of any track, "Not Specified" will be inserted in the converted track tag and used for any file naming purposes.
• ADDED: If TRACK (number) is non-existent or blank in the source version of any track, "1" will be inserted in the converted track tag and used for any file naming purposes.
• CHANGE: I restructured some of the DSP processing logic to ensure ALBUMARTIST & ARTIST are kept in-sync even better than before when exceptions are encountered in the source library
• NOTE: Coding remains in place to handle if DISC (number) is non-existent or blank in the source version of any track, where a "1" is inserted in the converted track tag and used for any file naming purposes.

I know you've manually made changes to fix the problem you had, but hopefully this updated set of dBpoweramp DSP settings are a little more robust to fend-off future issues for us all. Let me know if you have problems with this new update. I've done testing with a few dozen test tracks that include a lot of exceptions, but not my full 7K set of tracks I run with in my MS, as that takes nearly 3 days on my quad core 4gHz iMac to complete, and I'm confident I have clean data in all the critical tags of my source library. My best.

 

[BertL]

not sure if this is related to the issue mentioned by @hiroshiy but coincidentally just the other day I found a few albums on my USB which strangely had " - UNKNOWN" appended to the album title, both in the tags and on the enclosing folder...

Sorry! Try my updated V1a settings above. Hopefully it resolves the "- UNKNOWN" issue. If not, let me know and I'll work on it. Thanks.

 

[iffatall]

... e.g. M3 doesn't even have AM radio, and didn't have USB or even FM when the first public models shipped.... {:-(

OMG.. M3 doesn't have USB linked to the MP? In that case, I am afraid the MS interior refresh that I am so eagerly waiting for will not have it either..!!
Or did you mean M3 didn't at first, but it does now?

By the way, I wouldn't say "Elon does not see MP as a priority". Rather, I believe only Elon's own personal MP use case is a priority for Tesla. As in he uses the MP to listen to streaming music with genre specific stations, and that is what Tesla focuses on. Of course, this is only my guess.

 

[BertL]

BERT'S dBpoweramp MEDIA PLAYER 8.1 (Firmware 2018.6.1) WORKAROUND 03-13-2018

I had someone contact me asking for a pointer how to use the dBpoweramp settings some of us have been recently discussing here. I've gone ahead and updated the info below, replacing my last posted version from September 2017.​

Following is an overview of the transformations I make against copies of a subset of my master music library files, as well as the process I use with dBpoweramp -- either the Mac or Windows version. Most of the effort is automated building a USB device for my use in my (9-2015 build) MS. I have no affiliation with the referenced products themselves -- I'm just an end-user myself.

Most of the transformations are made to workaround a number of Tesla's MP (IMO) design flaws and bugs that I and others in this thread have found and mostly discussed upthread over the years, such as MP's incorrect reliance on ARTIST instead of ALBUMARTIST in most of the standard interface. This conversion process also hopefully allows more tracks to be managed within the current MP design and fixed CID memory constraints; perhaps reduces a few CPU cycles within the (sometimes apparently overtaxed original 2GB) CID; improves initial scan time; reduces some (but not all) unexpected rescans; allows correct album playback sequence to be maintained for even multi-disc albums; and provides a "sound leveling" function similar to other vehicles I've owned over the years. As discussed recently, the latest settings are also hopefully more robust to handle the most critical tag exceptions that may exist in your source music library.

More specifically, the "V1a" settings accomplish the following:

• For input, the process uses a temporary directory containing copies of the source master audio files you want converted for use in your MS. Your source music library is NEVER modified.
  
  
• If ARTIST or ALBUMARTIST are non-existent or blank in any track, it's replaced with "Various Artists"
• If ALBUM or TITLE are non-existent or blank in any track, it's replaced with "Not Specified"
  
• If TRACK(number) or DISC(number) are non-existent or blank in any track, it's replaced with "1"
  
• Eliminates all other tag data that isn't currently used by MP, with the exception of ALBUMARTIST that is being retained in hope one day Tesla will use that more appropriate tag for it's interface, so your already converted USB files will hopefully continue to work on the day the new firmware becomes available to you.
• Puts the contents of ALBUMARTIST into ARTIST in every track
  
• Changes all dBpoweramp-supported Album Art to JPG, and reduces it’s size to a maximum 300x300 pixels
• Changes (track)TITLE to “DISC(number)-TRACK(number) (track)TITLE” on every track
  
  
• Performs dBpoweramp Volume Normalize analysis against each track, physically changing the contents of the new track copy so the Tesla driver does not have to more constantly fiddle with the volume level as both soft/loud parts of a track, and across tracks of disparate albums are played.
  • This performs a methodical analysis of each track’s volume, looking across 6000ms windows of time and adjusting the volume slightly up/down just as you would using the physical volume control trying to keep relative playback volume similar during very soft and loud parts of the track. This seems to most closely emulate what I know as ASL or Automatic Sound Leveling options that are done real-time in other vehicles I’ve owned, except here it’s physically preprocessed into a copy of every track for playback later in my Tesla. I'm a pretty critical listener, and do not find this processing takes away from my content enjoyment or introduces some unnatural annoyance -- so don't poo-poo what this complex algorithm does without giving it a critical try yourself. The side benefit enabling this with the settings I use, is as you switch back-and-forth from USB Media Source to e.g. FM, the volume is pretty close to being the same, which isn't what happens otherwise as you switch between built-in MP sources.
  • THE BIG DRAWBACK is this takes an extraordinary amount of hands-off compute time to accomplish. From my experience, it increases the conversion time of tracks by 5-16X. If you don't want to use this, just delete the Volume Normalize line from the dBpoweramp DSP Effects after you load my settings. (E.g. it takes almost 3 days on my quad core 4.0gHz iMac to process ~7K tracks with Volume Normalize in effect.)

• Converts every source audio file of varying encoding types to MP3 VBR -V 0 Quality
  • I used FLAC playback for most of the first two years I owned my MS, but subsequently found playing only MP3 VBR actually causes less MP anomalies and unexpected CID hang/reboots. The possible reasons for this have been discussed upthread. YMMV of course. My suggestion is, don't be a snob as I initially was, thinking you must playback only lossless formats and can actually hear a difference in your MOVING MS with ambient road noise and the Premium Sound option. If you both study what MP3 VBR with my settings above technically do, then try listening to back-to-back copies of FLAC and VBR of the same tracks in your MS while you're driving, I think you'll be as surprised with the result as I have been. I still use lossless formats for most of my more critical home listening on my home audio system, but given the benefits I've encountered with less MP problems using MP3 VBR, I won't go back in my MS until significant MP improvements occur -- if they ever do.
  • If you still don't like the MP3 VBR format, you can easily override that back to FLAC on the dBpoweramp conversion menu while retaining the other benefits of these settings.
    
• dBpoweramp places the newly created version of the MP3 files into a 2-level directory structure: One folder off of the root for each album with related tracks inside, correctly handling track sequencing and multi-disc albums (assuming you have them tagged correctly in your master library to begin with).

The process:

• Extract files you want to convert from your master library into a temporary directory on your Mac or PC. (I use "Export for iTunes" available on the Mac App Store. Also for Mac iTunes users, an alternative is "M3Unify" from DougScripts.com.)
  
  
• Start dBpoweramp Music Converter
  • Point it at the temporary directory you just made and filled with source tracks
  • Click the Convert icon
  • On the conversion menu:
    • Encoding: MP3 (Lame)
      • Target: Quality (VBR)
      • Move the slider all the way to the right (high quality / larger file)
      • Encoding: Normal
    • Output To: Select "Edit Dynamic Naming" in the dropdown
      • Base Location: Specify the folder you want to put the converted tracks into
      • Dynamic Naming: [album] - [album artist]/[disc]-[track] [title]
        • If you have a real need and first think through the implications, change that directory structure as you desire for use in MP Folder View. Before changing anything, be sure you are aware of the pros and cons of too shallow and too deep folder structures discussed elsewhere in this thread, as well as the negative implications changes could have on being able to successfully use MP's standard views.
    • Unzip, then Load the attached DSP Effects / Actions into dBpoweramp
    • Click Convert and you’re on your way. Let your computer do it’s thing and go do something more productive.
      
• The final USB device housing the tracks you'll use in your MS needs to be formatted as FAT32 (or perhaps NTFS as was added to the Owner's Manual awhile back, but I've not tried it.) ExFAT, APFS, and MacOS Extended will NOT work or even present an error when you insert your USB device into the MS USB slot.

I suggest you give the process a try with a small number of tracks from various albums to see how it works in your MS. Make changes to fit your own needs and desire, then let the Converter run against your larger set of tracks. If you change the settings, remember to save the DSP Effects and make a note of your dynamic naming so you don't have to go through the trial-and-error again one day.

If you run into problems with the conversion or my settings, please reach out to me and I'll attempt to resolve the issues if I can.
Good luck! Enjoy that MS!

USB Devices
There are a number of posts upthread on a whole range of devices individual owners have had success with. I went so far as to test more than a dozen different make/models a while back and posted results somewhere above. IMO, there are some cheap USB devices that DO create more problems than they are worth. IMO, MP itself has enough problems, so in my attempt to eliminate as many variables under my control as possible, for the last several months I have maintained a PNY Elite 480GB USB 3.0 SSD in my MS. It's price keeps falling, and functionality for me has been flawless, while providing 3-4X the space I actually need to maintain 7K tracks. The USB 3.0 speed significantly helps when maintaining your device via your Mac or PC -- you'll be thankful for your investment. MP does not really need, and will not see a similar speed advantage, so if your MS music library is more static, it's your decision what makes sense for you.

General MP USB Troubleshooting
There is lots of discussion and suggestions throughout this thread, so search can be your friend. Hint-hint. Not all MP deficiencies can be worked-around by Owners. If you're just jumping into this, here are some bigger ticket items that may help:

CID or MP Hangs

Try a full reboot. Foot on brake; Press both scroll buttons; Hold all three until the Tesla T appears on the CID; Release.
Your USB device will then be scanned into MP automatically.
​

I've Changed Tag Data on my USB Device, but Still Seeing Old Data in MP

This varies from owner-to-owner, but in more recent firmware updates, a reboot and rescan of your USB device will not always clear everything MP had in CID memory from it's previous scan... meaning, if you make changes to things like album art or tag data associated with tracks on your USB device and then reinsert it into your MS, after the rescan takes place, you may still see the old version of the tag data in MP. The only way it seems you can consistently resolve this by forcing MP to open up the track to re-read tag data, is to change the physical track filename and or up-level directory name for the track(s) in question.​

USB device scanning seems to never complete or USB Percent Complete begins to slow to a crawl

You're likely out of memory. Go through the steps suggested below.​

Still Getting Way Too Many Rescans, CID Reboots or Hangs?

Despite best efforts at Owners developing workarounds, @#$& still happens with MP. IMO CID memory management is problematic at best, especially as demands on it are stretched and Tesla in it's design wisdom did not appear to have placed solid and documented limits on user-controllable variables. It appears some physical options an owner may and may not have on their MS (e.g. AP) can impact how much memory is available for USB music, as can things like phone contacts, Nav History, etc. My music conversion settings try to do what's possible to reduce memory usage within a track. If I were having problems (as I have), I'd first try:

1. Clean-out CID Memory to open-up more memory for your USB music
   Go into Nav History and manually delete all your old destinations. I keep mine below a dozen most of the time.
   If you have hundreds or thousands of contacts on your phone, consider using your phone's ability to limit the number of contacts and amount of data that your MS will copy over to the CID each time your phone connects to only what you really need.
   IDK if it really helps or not, but I also run the Nav display in line mode vs satellite view, and keep Nav as 1/2-screen just-in-case either thing helps -- every little bit counts when we're dealing with fixed memory each of our CIDs have to fit everything. I personally maintain less than 200 contacts from my iPhone to my MS, but am aware of at least one owner than has more than 2000! (IDK how much USB music that person may be able to also maintain within MP -- it can't be as much as me.)
2. Be sure you don't have an excessively deep directory structure on your USB device
   The key here is "only go as deep as you really must". Tesla has never documented a limit so perhaps there isn't one right now, but other auto mfgrs I'm familiar with place the physical limit at 6 or 8 maximum depth. Regardless of how Tesla has coded MP internally, the deeper you make your directory structure, the more memory it will consume in your CID -- it's simply a matter of magnitude how much that may or may not be depending on Tesla's internal MP design. I suggest you keep your music tracks no deeper than within 1-3 subdirectories unless you have a very good reason for something else.
3. Reduce the number of tracks on your USB device
   Present (not optimum) MP design seems to have it maintaining album art at the unique album title level, and tag data for each of your tracks within whatever available CID memory there is. As such, the more tracks you have, the longer it takes to scan and more memory is consumed to map pointers to the actual media file on your USB device for future playback. The more data you put into each of your track tags will also consume more CID memory, as it has to go somewhere. These variables, in addition with how much code and working areas Tesla uses for each new firmware release to support your MS, and then other user-specific items like Nav History, Phone Contacts, etc discussed above are the reason every Owner has success with varying numbers of tracks. What works for one of us, may not work for another Owner because Tesla has not documented and does not appear to have coded fixed maximums for any of this. That represents a huge variable that MAY cause all sort of issues as memory becomes constrained.
   There is more discussion far upthread somewhere but I did some MP stability testing in my own MS more than a year ago by incrementally reducing the number of tracks on my USB device over a number of days... I found up beyond 20K tracks my MS couldn't complete a scan of the USB device in several hours time -- I doubt it would ever finish. OTOH, when I keep the number of tracks around a sweet spot of 7K tracks or less using all of the settings I suggest here, I have far fewer unexpected problems and an initial scan will generally complete in less than 10-12 minutes. As I increase to 8K tracks and beyond, scan/rescan time begins to exponentially slow the more tracks I have on the device -- and with the possibility an unexpected rescan that can still occur when I least expect it, I just don't want to wait longer when I'm out and about. I suggest each of us will have a different sweet spot because of our MS options and all the variability, but there's a starting point if it helps you. (...and yes, I know there are some Owners with 15K or more tracks running without problems. I suggest our environments are different, and/or my tolerance level for defects is a lot less than others. )
4. Ensure you are using only the best supported media filetypes on your USB device.
   Not all formats seem to operate as well as others. Mixing-and-matching formats should work just fine, and generally do, but as to if maintaining or playing other formats cause longer-term stability issues, none of us as Owners can say with certainty. While I know other Owners have differing experiences, for me, using exclusively MP3 VBR audio encoding produces the least amount of problems in MP across the last few firmware updates. FLAC is a close second-best. I've previously tested AAC, AIF, M4A Lossy, basic MP3 and OGA (OGG Vorbis) and they play back as individual test cases, but I can't say more than that. WAV will play but is effectively outdated and does not support more recent ID3 tagging you likely expect, so don't use it. M4A Lossless has a bug or is just sadly unsupported even though it's been open source for many years. If you use my dBpoweramp conversion settings, it will handle conversion of nearly any music format available into a single standard -- helping maximize compatibility.

 

[BertL]

OMG.. M3 doesn't have USB linked to the MP? In that case, I am afraid the MS interior refresh that I am so eagerly waiting for will not have it either..!!
Or did you mean M3 didn't at first, but it does now?...

M3 didn't have FM or USB at first. When I read a review of one of the first public M3s that shipped, both were "still to come" via future firmware updates.

AM, OTOH, was said to not be in the future at all on a M3 ... maybe Elon sees that as forward thinking like not having a CD-player in our MS, but IMHO a world without AM is still too far out ,and the cost to put AM in to a new design just would't have been that big of a deal. While I don't listen to it often, I still see and use AM on road trips in construction areas, nearing airports and some special events for parking, etc. I'm sure most of us have seen those temporary road signs to tune into some limited distance AM station for more info. I see not having AM TODAY as a limitation in M3. Fortunately my MS has it for the few times I want it.

 

[MP3Mike]

I see not having AM TODAY as a limitation in M3.

The Model X also lacks an AM radio receiver. (At least that is what I recall.)

So I wouldn't be surprised if the next refresh for the Model S removes that feature as well.

 

[iffatall]

M3 didn't have FM or USB at first. When I read a review of one of the first public M3s that shipped, both were "still to come" via future firmware updates.

AM, OTOH, was said to not be in the future at all on a M3 ... maybe Elon sees that as forward thinking like not having a CD-player in our MS, but IMHO a world without AM is still too far out ,and the cost to put AM in to a new design just would't have been that big of a deal. While I don't listen to it often, I still see and use AM on road trips in construction areas, nearing airports and some special events for parking, etc. I'm sure most of us have seen those temporary road signs to tune into some limited distance AM station for more info. I see not having AM TODAY as a limitation in M3. Fortunately my MS has it for the few times I want it.

OK, that's good. USB connected to MP is an essential feature and must remain (even if buggy) until they have another solution like onboard storage.

I also use AM a lot when on road trips to National Parks, where they broadcast the latest road conditions, traffic etc. Often there is no phone signal (let alone 3G/LTE) in those areas. So AM going away is bad news for me.

 

[Legolad]

Congrats on your MX order. My thoughts:

... but Elon says yet another new Easter Egg will be provided very soon. {:-(

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.

 

[MP3Mike]

I just wish I could determine whether the ModelX supports AptX.

No it does not. (Though it is possible the new Intel based MCUs that just started being installed will. They are rumored to have a new WiFi/BT module, so it is possible they will support AptX.)