Embedded USB Album Art - How Do I Do It?

[Pruitt]

I have no album art with my USB music. Is there some trick to embedding it so it will show when a song is playing?

I ripped my entire collection of CDs (some 600 of them) into FLAC files while waiting for my MS delivery in March. I don't recall any sort of option to embed cover art.

I simply don't know where to start. Any suggestions?

 

[RichardL]

Most CD rippers will do this for you automatically (or semi automatically if you prefer)

I use a tool suite called dbpoweramp, which includes a cd ripper. When I place the CD into the drive, dbpoweramp reads it, gets the track info (typically via an internet connection), or rarely, you have to type it in. It also fetches one or more cover art files, or you can scan your CD and use that. Then it will embed the image into the file, as well as write it into your output folder as a .jpg.

I also use mp3tag, which allows you to open,examine and fix all the tags in a file (including FLAC files as well). You can also fix or update the cover art in this.

Obviously this is easier to do 'as you go' - going back to get art for 600 CDs is no small task

 

[Gizmotoy]

At this point, does it matter? Years ago I spent a lot of time embedding album art in every track in my library, and have kept it up for new files since. Pre-8.0 Model S just ignore them and grabbed art from Gracenote. Post-8.0 it just displays the generic music note.

Not a whole lot of benefit just yet.

 

[Pruitt]

At this point, does it matter? Years ago I spent a lot of time embedding album art in every track in my library, and have kept it up for new files since. Pre-8.0 Model S just ignore them and grabbed art from Gracenote. Post-8.0 it just displays the generic music note.

Not a whole lot of benefit just yet.

Not a big deal but I just like to see the album art when the music is playing. Those dumb eighth notes are pretty boring.

 

[Gizmotoy]

Not a big deal but I just like to see the album art when the music is playing. Those dumb eighth notes are pretty boring.

Well, like I said, it doesn't work...

Is this working for others as of 8.0 or something? It certainly isn't working on mine, and never has.

 

[JeffVanEpps]

Well, like I said, it doesn't work...

Is this working for others as of 8.0 or something? It certainly isn't working on mine, and never has.

Yes, embedded album art is working for me. I run Ubuntu Linux at home and used the eyeD3 program to embed the folder.jpgs I had around (for Sonos) into the individual mp3 files.

 

[Gizmotoy]

Yes, embedded album art is working for me. I run Ubuntu Linux at home and used the eyeD3 program to embed the folder.jpgs I had around (for Sonos) into the individual mp3 files.

Interesting. I have album art embedded and it's not working at all on mine. Will have to look into it, I guess.

 

[David29]

I have never tried to embed album art, but I did make a lot of effort to be sure the tags were correct so that the album art would be fetched by the Tesla from their online database (which is apparently Gracenote according to someone who posted above). So I agree, it is not working.
If they changed the functionality to require embedded art, I wish the release notes had said so. not that i intend to do the work to fetch and embed art for thousands of songs...!
Tesla's mistreatment of the USB user in the Audio app is really getting under my skin!

 

[jcoverton]

I keep all my music in Apple Lossless format with embedded album art. I used XLD on a Mac to convert about 6000 songs to FLAC for use in the Tesla. Prior to 8.0 some of my songs did not display art because they were not in Gracenote. I noticed recently that my album art is being displayed. I know my art is taking precedence as some of my covers are unique to my copy of a song. For example I may have the first Japanese pressing of an album and I included the Japanese cover art. Now that is being displayed instead of the generic version.

Now if they can fix being able to select USB songs like you could prior to the update. I especially don't like the missing alpha selector, or the inability to play an album in order for a specific artist. What would be really super would be to make the PLAY voice command search my usb files first before going to the internet.

 

[thecloud]

A previous post in the Firmware 8.0 thread has some links to programs for Mac and Windows that can add cover art to existing FLAC files (as opposed to adding it at the time the file was encoded.)

 

[BertL]

Folks, SOME imbedded Album Art is now appearing for 8.0 USB tracks. The problem is it's inconsistent.

I have 100% of my tracks in iTunes tagged with my own unique art (not iTunes consolidated album version that only works with iTunes and related Apple devices), and all display correctly in iTunes, all of my iOS devices (iPad, iPhone 7, iPod Nano, Apple Watch), as well as in macOS Finder -- but not all tracks will display art with 8.0.

As I've suggested in a couple other threads, I believe the issue is likely related to too-large of an image, be that dimensions or physical size wise, that are not appearing. One would hope Tesla would simply scale any valid art down to what it needs, rather than ignore it. Similarly, 8.0 seems to have broken some 8.0 Phone Media (aka "Bluetooth") art for things like Podcasts that display correctly on the iPhone, but some of which now don't appear on the Media Player Phone screen -- perhaps due to the same limitation as we're seeing with USB, IDK.​

I have personally elected to not spend the detailed time it will take to build copies of the same tracks with many variations of dimensions and then compression to see where Media Player 8.0 Art breaks.

My MS went in for annual service on Tuesday morning. I reported this bug, it's on my Service Invoice, and I asked if there are specific documented restrictions Tesla can provide for Album Art format, dimensions and size, or if the firmware is broken. I will report results (even if it's "to be resolved in a future firmware update") back in both the main Firmware 8.0 and the Comprehensive USB Bug List threads when my MS returns.

 

[ArtInCT]

As I mentioned in a very early post, I noticed that my FLAC's, when first played on 8.0 did not display album art at all. Then, over the course of a half hour, I replayed a FLAC and the album art seemed to have been "discovered" somehow. I wonder if the album art is discovered by a background process?

For MAC users, I have been converting high quality songs to FLAC using a program call SWITCH by NCH software.

I have chosen to have the FLACs encoded in the highest quality with sound leveling... and the results are very good.
I am sure there are other fine tools out there as well...

 

[jcadman22]

I've been using MediaMonkey for years. I have a large collection of files (>50K tracks) and MediaMonkey provides a great toolset for tagging and converting formats on the fly. For album art specifically, you can specify whether the image is front cover, back cover, media label, leaflet page, etc. Artwork display was hit or miss before 8.0, but it seems to be displaying fairly consistently for a small subset of my library.

 

[jcadman22]

After a few days of shuffling through tracks on my USB I can confirm with a high degree of confidence that 8.0 is properly reading the embedded album art from my file tags. As noted in my previous post, I use MediaMonkey for Windows to organize and tag my collection with the option to save artwork to tags. The artwork which I collected for some fairly obscure international and limited edition albums displayed correctly under 8.0 where the media player would have previously shown a random-ish photo of the artist/band.

The media player in 8.0 still has some massive usability issues, but this is a pleasant surprise. Fingers crossed that there's another update to follow that will restore the 7.x hierarchical navigation.

 

[bob_p]

I spent about an hour over the weekend and used MediaMonkey to add embedded art into all of my USB music.

At least it works on an album-by-album basis, so it didn't require that much effort to get by "favorites" USB stick updated with album art - that will be correct (instead of the random art we've seen in previous software releases).

But, is this really what Tesla expects their owners to do???

 

[majorlance]

I realize that this is an older thread. For those that have been to the service center, has there been any resolution?

I use the TeslaTunes app to convert my iTunes library. Works great...

What I've noticed (and I guess I'm asking if anyone else has seen this) is that the media player in 8.0 picks up embedded album art for AAC and MP3 files. It doesn't pick them up from Flac files (or at least Flac files that have been converted from Apple lossless by XLD). I checked my converted Flac audio files in VLC and it shows the correct album art if choose display information.

I also converted an Apple Lossless file to AAC and it nows shows the correct album art.

I also read some time ago that the Media Player caches the art work. I don't know if this has changed. I am assume that Tesla still does not support Apple Lossless.

As a side note, when I play the lossless file through bluetooth the correct album art shows up most of the time.

Thoughts?

 

[BertL]

I realize that this is an older thread. For those that have been to the service center, has there been any resolution?

I use the TeslaTunes app to convert my iTunes library. Works great...

What I've noticed (and I guess I'm asking if anyone else has seen this) is that the media player in 8.0 picks up embedded album art for AAC and MP3 files. It doesn't pick them up from Flac files (or at least Flac files that have been converted from Apple lossless by XLD). I checked my converted Flac audio files in VLC and it shows the correct album art if choose display information.

I also converted an Apple Lossless file to AAC and it nows shows the correct album art.

I also read some time ago that the Media Player caches the art work. I don't know if this has changed. I am assume that Tesla still does not support Apple Lossless.

As a side note, when I play the lossless file through bluetooth the correct album art shows up most of the time.

Thoughts?

The album art issue IIRC, and as I reported in a then current thread somewhere is with TeslaTunes not dealing with album art correctly with FLAC. This one is not a Tesla issue, even though there are plenty of others. Time to retire TeslaTunes and find an alternative like most of us have.

Check out Comprehensive USB Bug List -- it's much more current and where most of us hang out related to USB issues. To save you some searching (this one time -- ah ha), quick answers to your other questions all discussed in a lot more detail there are: Right, Tesla still does not support Apple Lossless. Art cache has changed in more recent code drops, some for the good, others not so much IMHO. Yes, Bluetooth works as you found, but that's because your phone or non-Tesla player is doing the heavy lifting, not Tesla's Media Player.

See you in the referenced thread. Plenty there for you to get caught up on!

 

[majorlance]

BertL,

Thanks! The 53 page bug list does have some interesting insight into the Media Player/Album Art issue that has been around since I purchased my car over two years ago. At least now we have shuffle mode...

I had originally written an Applescript to rename the genre to a playlist name to work around Tesla's lack of playlist support (why does this seem to be so hard!) and shared it with this forum. In response, Teslatunes was written by another user and, at the time, improved on my script and was a native Mac app with more features. So far so good.

It looks like 8.0 has changed everything, except sometimes it doesn't. Still trying determine what works where. IMHO it shouldn't be as much of a mystery as it is.

I'd really like for the media player to just work. Too much overhead in managing audio which most other high-end cars handle. Hence my frustration...

I agree that it looks like Teslatunes does not (or maybe the XLD code) handle the transfer of album art correctly. Don't know where the problem is with my library but I am testing a couple of different scenarios. At this point, it does look like the Apple lossless to Flac conversion is the challenge. But, why can't it just work...

I'll search the forum but any quick links to what others are using to manage their libraries? I saw a number of programs listed in the bug list but didn't see any that focused on creating playlists. Most were on managing "outside of iTunes" files which for me is a non-starter.

Thanks again for the pointers.

Lee

 

[BertL]

BertL,

Thanks! The 53 page bug list does have some interesting insight into the Media Player/Album Art issue that has been around since I purchased my car over two years ago.

I had originally written an Applescript to rename the genre to a playlist name to work around Tesla's lack of playlist support (why does this seem to be so hard!) and shared it with this forum. In response, Teslatunes was written by another user and, at the time, improved on my script and was a native Mac app with more features. So far so good.

It looks like 8.0 has changed everything, except sometimes it doesn't. Still trying determine what works where. IMHO it shouldn't be as much of a mystery as it is.

I'd really like for the media player to just work. Too much overhead in managing audio which most other high-end cars handle. Hence my frustration...

I agree that it looks like Teslatunes does not (or maybe the XLD code) handle the transfer of album art correctly. Don't know where the problem is with my library but I am testing a couple of different scenarios. At this point, it does look like the Apple lossless to Flac conversion is the challenge. But, why can't it just work...

I'll search the forum but any quick links to what others are using to manage their libraries? I saw a number of programs listed in the bug list but didn't see any that focused on creating playlists. Most were on managing "outside of iTunes" files which for me is a non-starter.

Thanks again for the pointers.

Lee

NP. I played with your script originally while my MS was on order, then like you, found TeslaTunes and was happy with that until Tesla started supporting Album Art and I tracked down the issue being with that app... If you look through that long thread, depending on what bothers you most, you'll see there are quite a number of things with MP 8.0 that require workarounds, and the problems change and workarounds have had to be tweaked many times after a number of firmware releases... Look for some of my posts there... As a Mac guy, I use "Export for iTunes" (on the Mac App Store, but there are others too) that makes copies of tracks from iTunes Playlists, then I use dBpoweramp to convert and manipulate tag data and file names onto a USB a device I play in my MS...

 

[drklain]

Is there a good program to pull the songs out of iTunes on a windows computer into a format for USB/Tesla that does this fairly easily?