Easy iTunes playlist syncing for Tesla USB flash drive

[ra-san]

Hmm, yeah that's incredibly slow. Sounds like a really slow USB drive, but can check by seeing how long a copy of the same files to the drive takes using the finder.
The app shouldn't be much slower than dragging and dropping the file yourself. It has to be a little slower just because it has to look into each file to see if it is apple lossless, and has to do the convert if so. But that doesn't really take very long per file. If you find the app is more than twice as slow as just a raw copy of the same files, I'd like to know about it.

 

[Jeffgtx]

Ra-san,

seeing and interesting behavior that i dont think is intentional...

when i play a song through the tesla song/artist/genre selection buttons, song title, artist and album are displayed and eventually some odd cover art shows up.

if i play through the folder button, either going through music or playlists folder, the full filename will flash ("01-Song-Artist-etc) and then only the song title will show. no artist or album data.

is that expected?

Jeff

 

[ny888]

Ra-San,

Tried a different USB flash drive and plugged directly into back of iMac and it was much faster. Scan happened in a blink but copy still took a minute for 8 songs.

Tried playing the stick at the dealership in 2 different cars (comparing standard vs. premium sound system) and it worked in both. Played using genre and album art was inconsistent. Sometimes showed, sometimes didn't. I didn't get random art though like Jeffgtx.

Michael

 

[ra-san]

I noticed the just the song title only display in folder mode a couple days ago too. I can't remember if it had always been like that with manually copied media, not converted by my app. I'm going to test with some files untouched by the app.
If that's just the way the S works, I guess that could be a good reason to use the genre mapping. Pretty lame though. If it happens just with flac files I converted, then maybe I can fix it (though I did compare my flac conversion vs. other flac files from other sources and they looked right). For the non apple lossless to flac files, it's just a file copy so if it happens with them, must be the way the S works

- - - Updated - - -

So just tried a fresh fob untouched by my app, and yeah - seems to just be the way the folder functionality works. Kind of annoying. Really hope for better media player functionality soon, and real playlist support (and frankly, for CarPlay and Android car whatever equiv)

Guess maybe I will use the genre mapping too, that way I can play them in playlist order if I use play by folder, and can play them with more info showing for the common cases of me just hitting shuffle anyway.

Ra-San,

Tried a different USB flash drive and plugged directly into back of iMac and it was much faster. Scan happened in a blink but copy still took a minute for 8 songs.

Tried playing the stick at the dealership in 2 different cars (comparing standard vs. premium sound system) and it worked in both. Played using genre and album art was inconsistent. Sometimes showed, sometimes didn't. I didn't get random art though like Jeffgtx.

Michael

Glad things were faster and you got to hear the audio in the vehicle.
What was the source audio format? Unfortunately album art is outside of what we can do anything about. The car looks for it in its own way, whether it is in the file metadata or not (I don't remove it from copied files, and do recreate it and put it in the flac file, for apple lossless conversions).

 

[Jeffgtx]

well that's just plain silly for it to handle the same filename two different ways. i've never used a usb stick in the car before, so i assuemd it was something the way the playlist folder data was moved. sorry for the false alarm.

thanks for troubleshooting it.

 

[majorlance]

All of what you're seeing is standard Tesla media player behavior.

1) In folder mode no album art is available.
2) When playing via genre, song, artist, etc. album art is pulled from the internet, not the embedded artwork in a song file. The Tesla media player seems to pull from album title first, artist second. You can get some really weird results but the cleaner the tags are the more likely Tesla will find the right artwork.
3) If you have a slow/old USB drive or connection the initial copy (not even syncing) can take hours. Agree with ra-san that you should see around 6 mb for a USB 2.0 and much faster for a USB 3.0 flash drive (assuming your Mac supports 3,0). Future syncs (ra-sans app or my script) will be much faster and much closer to what you'd see syncing an iPod or iPhone to iTunes.
4) For me, playlists are the way to go. And the genre change (to rename genre to playlist) make it so simple. If you want, buy a second USB (in my case) low profile flash drive (64 GB on Amazon for $33) and copy just you're favorite songs without changing the genre. I posted a script that would do this and I believe ra-sans script will do this too). Then you have the best of both worlds. If you need an extra USB charging port, buy a $24 12v USB adapter with two USB ports for the 12v adapter. Problem solved...

What we really need is the Tesla media player to support m3u playlists (like 99.99% of all the cars and media players) and all of this will be just a distant memory! Or, add Apple Carplay support (sorry Android user) and we'll have even more...

My two cents!

 

[ny888]

What was the source audio format? Unfortunately album art is outside of what we can do anything about. The car looks for it in its own way, whether it is in the file metadata or not (I don't remove it from copied files, and do recreate it and put it in the flac file, for apple lossless conversions).

They are mp3's.

 

[ra-san]

Updated to handle removing playlists that aren't selected any more from the destination playlist folder. Also added autoupdating (you choose whether to check or not, standard mac behavior - uses Sparkle, same as a bazillion other apps).

 

[ra-san]

Added a couple more requested options. If you have the version mentioned in the last post, should offer to auto update. Otherwise available from the links previously posted.

 

[dashrb]

BTW, I tried using hard links once to replicate a playlist on a flash drive but it didn't work. I can't remember how it failed but my plan was to create a master library and then copy links to another folder for a playlist like function.

btw, flash drives have some form of a FAT filesystem (specific version of FAT depends on the size of the memory), and FAT doesn't support hard links (or soft links either). You're forced to have separate copies of the file.

Thanks for the utility!

- - - Updated - - -


Hello ra-san,

I'm getting a crash when I scan my library (I can scan one playlist successfully). The relevant-looking section looks like this:

Application Specific Information:
*** Terminating app due to uncaught exception 'NSInvalidArgumentException', reason: '*** -[NSCountedSet addObject:]: attempt to insert nil'
abort() called
terminating with uncaught exception of type NSException


Application Specific Backtrace 1:
0 CoreFoundation 0x00007fff8447503c __exceptionPreprocess + 172
1 libobjc.A.dylib 0x00007fff8585a76e objc_exception_throw + 43
2 CoreFoundation 0x00007fff84474eed +[NSException raise:format:] + 205
3 Foundation 0x00007fff8cb6ad7f -[NSCountedSet addObject:] + 81
4 TeslaTunes 0x000000010f9efaac -[CopyConvertDirs processFileURL:toDestinationerformScanOnly:withPlaylist:] + 773
5 TeslaTunes 0x000000010f9f1531 -[CopyConvertDirs processOpsWithPlaylistSelections:andSourceDirectoryURL:toDestinationDirectoryURLerformScanOnly:] + 1354
6 TeslaTunes 0x000000010f9edf8d __85-[CopyConvertDirs startOperationOnDir:withPlaylistSelections:andSourceDir:toDestDir:]_block_invoke + 74
....


The crash occurs when I select "copy whole library/folder" (and choose my music folder; about 4200 songs), with every other checkbox OFF.

Is there a way to turn on logging to see which file is at fault?

 

[ra-san]

I suspect there is a file with no extension, and I overlooked that particular case when I was logging the extensions skipped. I fixed it on my system, and am testing. Will push it if I think it's solved. In the meantime, if it's just a stray file, you can move it, or you can use playlists instead of the folder copy (presuming all the playlists files have extensions). Will try to have a fix out on Wednesday.

Update: I tried to recreate it, but couldn't. I'd thought I'd tested that case before and handled it ok - in some of the sample screenshots that's why it shows the " files skipped: <some number>" in the extensions skipped list, because no extension was getting reported to me as an empty field vs. a non-existent one (which probably sounds odd, but makes a difference to the part that crashed).

Regardless though I don't at the moment see where else it would be, and there's was a potential issue there so I "fixed" it (hard to say fixed though, when you can't see the problem).

I also enabled a log message for skipping a file with an unknown or empty extension. I had it turned off in the interest of not adding too much cruft to logs, and I haven't added an "enable verbose logging" setting or anything yet (probably should). You can see the log messages in the Console app.

Here's the updated app. https://github.com/tattwamasi/TeslaTunes/releases/download/1.2.2/TeslaTunes_1.2.2.zip

I'm really not sure this is the issue for you, so would appreciate you letting me know after you have a chance to try the update. You can PM me, use the issues feature on the project page, or whatever. I did already add an issue for it in the issue tracker: crash when scanning library

 

[ny888]

ra-san - I'm using your app to transfer music to usb. When I test drove the car, the playlist order was preserved. I just picked up my car and it's in Alphabetical Artist order, is there a setting I'm missing?

 

[ra-san]

Sounds like you are just not in the same play mode on the model S that you remember. If you play by folder, it will arrange the songs in directory order, and since I name them to preserve playlist order, that's what they'll be in. If you play by artist or anything else, the S is sorting alphabetically based on the tags you are looking at.

 

[ny888]

Sounds like you are just not in the same play mode on the model S that you remember. If you play by folder, it will arrange the songs in directory order, and since I name them to preserve playlist order, that's what they'll be in. If you play by artist or anything else, the S is sorting alphabetically based on the tags you are looking at.

I'm sure you're right but the car is at the detailer right now so I don't have access to it, what exactly do I need to do to play by folder. I picked on USB, Genre, and the Playlist "genre" name

Figured out the Play By Folder. What's really strange is playing by genre with the same playlist shows songs missing. The same 2 playlist doesn't have the same songs !

 

[Koryin]

I've got a windows version of this if anyone is interested...

 

[perkiset]

Fell in love again.

I had always heard the Bluetooth was limited or compressed, didn't know the extent.

Ran MajorLance's routine to put about 5K songs on a stick and WOW. So impressed. Thanks for the great script, it worked like a champ and, incredibly, made my UHF black S85 rocket ship EVEN BETTER.

Thanks man, well done.

 

[dsm363]

I couldn't get the script to work on a Mac.

 

[perkiset]

I couldn't get the script to work on a Mac.

What happened? What error did you get?

 

[omarsultan]

Here's the updated app. https://github.com/tattwamasi/TeslaTunes/releases/download/1.2.2/TeslaTunes_1.2.2.zip

Just stumbled into this thread - thanks for taking the time to write and update this app.

 

[dsm363]

What happened? What error did you get?

I'll have to run it again. I had a 'Tesla' playlist. It ran through a bunch of text but nothing was copied over.