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Finally discovering TuneIn

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tinm

2020 Model S LR+ Owner
May 3, 2015
2,463
12,332
New Mexico, USA
Never bothered to mess around with TuneIn until about a week ago, and now I am hooked. It's such a delight to stumble upon a feature in the car that was sitting there for (how long? not sure when it arrived in the firmware... I don't think it was there when I got the car in 2013)....

I now have favorited a bunch of stations all over the world including lots of music, news/talk stations that I listened to in previous cars when I lived in other regions. It's a thrill to not only get them again, but get crisp, crystal-clear reception even on AM radio stations.

I like my car all over again now....

(Though I still wish Tesla would support browsing playlists/albums/artists/genres for iPods and smartphones w/ Music apps like iPhone)
 
One issue I often face with this is that there is no easy way to search for stations from within the car. The only way is to add favorites elsewhere (desktop/phone), and then access your favorites in the car.

That's what I do too. Another good thing is that stations like CNN are not available to us on TuneIn in Canada but we can still add them as favorites and listen to them in the car because it routes through the States.
 
Another TuneIn question: once one uses a personal TuneIn account in the Tesla, I assume one would never be able to log in again using the default account Tesla had set up, right (not knowing the password, etc)?

Not that that is a big deal, it's just, Murphy's Law being what it is, I can imagine scenario where TuneIn starts charging for its free accounts, but the old Tesla-provided accounts would continue to work, as long as you were still signed in :)
 
Another TuneIn question: once one uses a personal TuneIn account in the Tesla, I assume one would never be able to log in again using the default account Tesla had set up, right (not knowing the password, etc)?

Not that that is a big deal, it's just, Murphy's Law being what it is, I can imagine scenario where TuneIn starts charging for its free accounts, but the old Tesla-provided accounts would continue to work, as long as you were still signed in :)

I could be wrong but unlike Slacker I don't think there is a Tesla account for TuneIn so you should be good but even if I'm wrong, like the Slacket account, all you have to do is send an email with your VIN to Tesla support who will give it to you.
 
TuneIn doesn't require an account to work, so I'm pretty certain there wasn't a default free Tesla account configured with the car from the factory. Just login with your own account (free, or premium) and don't worry.

And yes using your own account on another device to explore and setup favourite stations and podcasts is the way to go, that's what I do on my iPhone. The TuneIn interface in the car is otherwise useless.
 
+1 and +1 There is no default login for TuneIn Just delete your personal ID and PW and it is back to default.

Side note to Podcast listeners that didn't already know this trick. You need do a two step process to get your personal Podcasts to update since your last refresh. Go to Control panel, settings, apps, media and logout and login to the TuneIn app and your podcasts will be updated since your last refresh.
 
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Reactions: msnow
The reason I use a separate app for Podcasts (I use the iOS one) is because whenever I've used TuneIn in the past, stopping and starting the car or a loss of connectivity would make my podcast start again from the beginning. Is this fixed? It's much more convenient to have them all in the same place from car to car or just headphones on my iPhone. However, if that's fixed, I might use TuneIn on road trips for Podcasts I haven't downloaded.
 
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The one thing I gotta say is pretty embarrassing with TuneIn (and with Tesla's AM/FM radio features too) is the extremely unreliable matching of "album image" with radio station or radio program you're listening to. I don't know what database TuneIn/Tesla are using, but it doesn't seem to be CDDB (I'm guessing some open source thing like FreeDB).

The result? Sometimes hilarious mismatches. This morning I was flipping thru various stations I'd saved in TuneIn, and I landed on the Stephanie Miller talk show, and the "program" info underneath the title said something something I forget, but it included the word "Dark". So what did the screen show as the "album cover" for this? Some extremely creepy band's album cover with two fat, elderly naked women caricatures sitting on a couch or something. I couldn't believe what was seeing.

I switched to various NPR stations around the country, and they too were showing all kinds of unrelated, wildly unrelated, album covers, where the only thing that matched was one word in the program title and the album title. I mean, talk about lousy database work.
 
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I have a love/hate relationship with TuneIn in the Tesla. From the very beginning (3+ years ago), there are constant issues with streams that just don't start playing (forever-spinning circle or need WiFi to play), or just randomly stopping the stream (this has been fixed), or no way to continue where you left off (this has been sort of fixed with the scrub-bar), horrible search/browse capability, and no way to favorite a category/folder.
 
the strange mismatched album art is also a problem for the Model S playing music stored on a USB drive. So it's not just a TuneIn thing, it must just be whatever crappy database they are using for all media. Seems if it doesn't find an EXACT match it will randomly pick something else totally unrelated

I've seen strange album art on mainstream top40 artists titles, e.g. an album with a special edition version in the album name gets matched to the completely wrong artist with an album name that's not even close. But edit file to remove the special edition name and it finds the correct album art

I don't think the media player is getting any attention from Tesla engineers, there are many little things about it that should be easy to fix
 
Still restarts podcasts if you stop/start the car. Makes podcasts unusable (for me). My favorite podcasts are around 1.5 hours long. My normal daily drive is way less than that.

Any workaround??
Mike

Yes, indeed frustrating with longer podcasts. What I have found is that once the podcast is downloaded to the buffer, and as long as you don't switch media (e.g. go to radio for a moment), it stays there even after shutting down the car. When you come back, you can easily fast forward using the slider bar to where you left off, since it doesn't have to download again. Only trick is remembering where you left off.