Firmware 6.2 Audio Enhancements?

[Andyw2100]

Funny thing- album art recognition has been very strong over the last month or so. But it seems to miss more with the 6.2 release. Not certain if this is because the cars art cache was cleared or Tesla is having issues on the server side (or where ever the car checks for artwork). Haven't changed the songs on the flash drive at all.

What is your take on whether or not the system is ever using the artwork stored on the flash drive? If you think it uses it in some cases, do you have any idea what cases those might be, or in other words how we might intentionally "trick" the system into using the artwork we want it to use, instead if looking for artwork that it thinks will match?

 

[majorlance]

What is your take on whether or not the system is ever using the artwork stored on the flash drive? If you think it uses it in some cases, do you have any idea what cases those might be, or in other words how we might intentionally "trick" the system into using the artwork we want it to use, instead if looking for artwork that it thinks will match?

From all of my testing, I don't think there is any way to trick it. It looks like only pulls from the internet. That said, once the artwork is cached, it does re-use it. I had the hardest time in January (when I first got my car) getting the album art to show up. At some point, the lookup function improved dramatically and it regularly pulled artwork and the *correct* artwork. It's a little hit or miss for me. Not certain if it is 6.2 or just something on the server side.

I tried querying engineering on how/where they were getting the artwork but never received a follow-up. Not surprised as it isn't a critical thing but until we know how they do it, it's tough to fix it or work around it.

- - - Updated - - -

Sounds the same to me. I have the upgraded sound. Turning Dolby on collapses the sound field to primarily the front speakers. Try moving the sound field all the way to the rear and then toggle Dolby. You'll hear much more rear speaker sound with Dolby off, and more rear speaker sound is needed to create an enveloping sound stage.

I have the Reus Systems upgrade and it made a big difference in the overall sound. But I still think that my MB S Harmon Kardon system sounded better. The sound stage on the Tesla is way up front and it seems to be missing some lower mid-range clarity, particularly for older songs from the late 60's and early/mid 70's (Beatles/Allman Brothers, etc.). (Real oldies from the mid-60's just weren't mixed well enough to really sound good and the newer stuff sounds pretty good- all IMHO). But I am going to investigate what system improvements I can add to improve the clarity and sound stage.

Any one have any success in addressing these areas? (Mostly referring to flash drive playback. Internet and blue tooth are limited by their bandwidth...)

 

[Andyw2100]

From all of my testing, I don't think there is any way to trick it. It looks like only pulls from the internet. That said, once the artwork is cached, it does re-use it. I had the hardest time in January (when I first got my car) getting the album art to show up. At some point, the lookup function improved dramatically and it regularly pulled artwork and the *correct* artwork. It's a little hit or miss for me. Not certain if it is 6.2 or just something on the server side.

I tried querying engineering on how/where they were getting the artwork but never received a follow-up. Not surprised as it isn't a critical thing but until we know how they do it, it's tough to fix it or work around it.

I had also thought, based on what I had read on TMC, that the system was only grabbing album art from online sources. But then I had an experience that led me to believe otherwise. It could have been an oddly timed coincidence, but this is what happened:

After moving FLAC files to a new USB drive, I noticed a pretty common album didn't have any album art associated with it. I checked, and saw that somehow I either didn't have the file named correctly in the proper folder, or that it was in the wrong folder. (I just don't remember which it was now.) I corrected that, replaced the USB drive, and the album art was immediately recognized. Sure, that could have been a coincidence, but the timing really made me think that the system "found" the album art that I provided.

I know once the system finds some album art and caches it that it is very difficult to get the system to replace it. I did some searching on that, and Todd Burch has some posts on the subject and says that changing the song name is a workaround to get the system to look for the album art again, though the one time I tried that it almost instantly found the same wrong art it had found before, instead of the art I had provided, named a couple of different ways, in the proper folder. (I tried naming the art both "folder.jpg" and the "album_name.jpg", and neither worked.)

Any thoughts?

 

[tomas]

Mine has never picked up my tagged art. Always gets it from some random, mostly wrong source. If it ever has right art, that's a coincidence. It goes by tags to search it's source, which is why prior poster had no art til he fixed tags

 

[Andyw2100]

Mine has never picked up my tagged art. Always gets it from some random, mostly wrong source. If it ever has right art, that's a coincidence. It goes by tags to search it's source, which is why prior poster had no art til he fixed tags

Sorry, but the last part of what you wrote is incorrect. But thanks for both not reading what I wrote accurately and assuming that I was a moron.

I clearly said that I did not have --THE FILE-- named correctly or placed in the proper location. That would be the album art file associated with the flac files. The only file name I changed or file I moved was the one for the album art. If they system is ignoring our album art files, my changing that file name or moving that file would have had no bearing on anything.

Obviously if the flac files weren't named properly the system wouldn't be able to find the album art for them. That pretty much goes without saying, doesn't it?

 

[tomas]

You belong in snippiness for being so nasty. I read that music file named wrong, easy interpretation to make.

 

[Andyw2100]

You belong in snippiness for being so nasty. I read that music file named wrong, easy interpretation to make.

It's not easy to assume that someone who is writing fairly intelligently about relatively complex aspects of the audio system, who makes reference to having searched on the topic, would not understand that if the files were not named properly the system would have no way to find them. That actually takes some doing.

 

[zwede]

Huge improvement in FM radio reception for me. The radio stations are all to the south of Dallas, I'm to the North so reception generally sucks. Pre 6.2 I could not listen to any Digital FM music stations. The sound would go from normal, to no treble, to underwater, and then back to normal constantly. This is now 90% gone. Still hit some spots where it distorts a bit but nothing like before.

 

[ITSELE]

I was hoping that one of the new codecs supported would be Apple Lossless (ALAC)... It's not, I checked. I'll continue converting my 50,000 song collection to FLAC. Maybe some day it will happen since it is open source (discussed many places previously).

 

[majorlance]

Just in case you didn't see it, we have a thread on converting apple lossless to flac. XLD can help with that. Or, Ra-san wrote a script that will copy your entire library to a flash drive and automatically convert the Apple Lossless to flac. I wrote a script that copies songs, converts apple lossless and renames the genre of selected playlist to the playlist name. That way you have a "playlist" function using the Genre selection in the Tesla media player.

Here's the thread:

Easy iTunes playlist syncing for Tesla USB flash drive

I wish Apple lossless was supported, along with m3u playlists. It would make life so much easier!

 

[majorlance]

Album art tagging has consistently been a bit of a mystery to me in the Tesla. Andyw2100 mentioned his experience with artwork in this thread and I can really relate to it...

Background- I wrote a script to help with iTunes playlist integration, referenced above. (I'm passionate about my music and for some reason artwork is also important to me! ) Although the script is a great workaround for the lack of playlist support in the current media app, album artwork still remains a black hole in terms of how it works.

The following is what I've observed but I would really appreciate any feedback on your own experience...

1) When you plug in a USB flash drive the Tesla media player scans the entire flash drive. My guess is that it builds a database of the song information stored in the ID3 tags (part of any song that includes album, artist, song name, genre, etc.) that is embedded in the folder. An ID3 tag also includes album art (and other information) but the media player seems to ignore this.

2) If it recognizes the folder and file name of the song (i.e. it has not changed since the last time the USB flash drive was scanned), it doesn't re-scan the ID3 tag. This means that you can change the song name or genre but it won't be picked up by the media player unless the folder and/or the file name on the flash drive changes. I've been able to duplicate this with a genre change and believe it to be true- which means if you change the tags associated with a song file, you need to change either the file name or folder to have it re-scanned.

3) The media player appears to pull all of the album art from the from the CDDB internet database. It ignores all album art either embedded in the song or associated with the song in a separate jpg file. It does appear to to re-use artwork if the file has been identified in the past. This is just a hypothesis on my part based from what I've seen...

4) Having the correct song name, artist and album greatly increases the odds that the correct artwork will show but doesn't guarantee it. Things like ampersands ("&") vs. "and" or anything else (Artist label name, "EXPLICIT", etc.) in the tags can create difficulty for the media player to find the right artwork.

5) It tends to batch up the requests and it (media player) seems to get stuck sometimes on a query (to the CDDB database, I assume) which then keeps all of the other songs from loading artwork. An example would be when scrolling through songs- On my car, it can lag and then, all of a sudden, four or five songs display the (sometimes proper) artwork.

6) Artwork loads much faster (if scrolling through songs or albums) when on my home wifi vs. 3G connection in the car.

As an example, I did a test and just *couldn't* get the Grateful Dead's "Eyes of the World" to show artwork, regardless of the artist name ("The Grateful Dead", "Grateful Dead") and the song/album/artist are not obscure! Then, as if by magic, the artwork appeared regardless of the spelling of the artist name. And I had the artwork embedded in the song file.

So... long and short, I believe that this remains a hit or miss proposition until Tesla decides to prioritize the embedded album art for display vs. internet lookup. And it would help if they just told us how it worked. That way, we cold optimize our approach to all of this.

Anyway, with any luck (and a little help from Tesla), we'll figure all of this out. My car is one of the few places that I get to play what I want, how loud I want and just enjoy it along with the driving experience. It's been a priority for me since I purchased the car.

Again, any thoughts or feedback (from the engineering team as an example...) would be greatly appreciated!

Lee

 

[Todd Burch]

Regarding (2), you are right...but I've found a better way to clear the cache is to put a different, small jumpdrive with a few songs into the USB port. The new device ID (I assume) forces a rescan, and the previous cache is lost. Then plug your original storage device in, and it will rescan.

Beats trying to think up new ways to automatically rename files, which is a pain and I've found (in more recent versions) is less reliable for triggering a rescan.

 

[Andyw2100]

Regarding (2), you are right...but I've found a better way to clear the cache is to put a different, small jumpdrive with a few songs into the USB port. The new device ID (I assume) forces a rescan, and the previous cache is lost. Then plug your original storage device in, and it will rescan.

Beats trying to think up new ways to automatically rename files, which is a pain and I've found (in more recent versions) is less reliable for triggering a rescan.

Unfortunately I can say that based on a trial of one with version 6.2 on my P85D tonight, the "better way" on longer seems to work, while the way described in Majorlance's 2) above did.

I edited a track that was not being recognized properly. Tried Todd's method of swapping smaller drive several times, without success. I even went so far as to try to force the system to recognize the older, larger drive as USB 2 by leaving the smaller drive in place (after it didn't work the first couple of times), and that did not work. Removing the smaller drive at that point left the system recognizing the larger drive as USB2, even though it was the only drive in place. I then tried swapping it back into the other slot, but still without luck. Basically no combination of switching the small drive and the large drive had any effect whatsoever. I could not get the system to use the new tag data.

I then brought the drive in to my computer, changed the folder name very slightly, and the change was immediately picked up by the system when the drive was reinserted.

I realize this is just one data point, so others feel free to jump in and add your current observations as to how this is working.

Also, on a related note, I read what you wrote in another thread, Todd, about having Tesla engineering delete (or erase) the meta data cache. I actually called in on Saturday to attempt to have that done and the rep that answered the phone had no idea what I was talking about. Initially he told me I could do it myself by simply rebooting the 17" display. I told him that was incorrect, and that if he could not do it that it was something that engineering would have to do. He said he would open a case, but I have not heard back. When you had this done, was it something handled immediately, on your initial call, by the person who took the call? If not, what was the process?

Thanks.

 

[Seattle]

i have an issue i haven't seen reported. Twice since i upgraded to 6.2 (and i have upgraded audio), when playing mp3s from my flash drive, in the middle of a son the sound hugely degraded and became kind of 50% static. I never noticed that before on my mp3s. It was like the codec kind of crashed in the middle of playing the song. anyone else seen this? I need to carefully repro it on those songs.

 

[jerry33]

i have an issue i haven't seen reported. Twice since i upgraded to 6.2 (and i have upgraded audio), when playing mp3s from my flash drive, in the middle of a son the sound hugely degraded and became kind of 50% static. I never noticed that before on my mp3s. It was like the codec kind of crashed in the middle of playing the song. anyone else seen this? I need to carefully repro it on those songs.

About once every two months a random track will "stutter". My guess would be the buffer garbage collector didn't work and it filled up. Skipping to the next track fixes it. (FLAC encoding). This has happened since 5.9.

 

[invisik]

Finally!! Somebody who cares about this like I do! I'm interested in learning more here too... obviously they've done some tuning of the FM antennas... which was needed. It seemed to switch back and forth between the multiple antennas too much (especially when HD radio was on) causing weird echoing and other stuff even on mid-strength signals... forget about it on low signals.

That's good to hear. I've had various FM issues along the way too.. I'll pay closer attention and see if mine has improved too.

Anyone notice if it addresses the occasional no audio at all until get out/back in or reboot? That one is so sporadic I'd have to wait 6 months or so until I'd decide it was resolved.

Thanks.

-m

 

[Knobby]

Whatever changes they made to the audio codecs I think made a huge improvement. I have the standard audio and it is vastly better now. I'd say it has gone from annoying sound, to pretty acceptable. The overall sound has changed. Used to be besides weak bass, a sort of annoying exaggeration of certain frequencies or sounds... could not get the 3 band tone control to improve it. Now it's much much better. Improvement especially noticeable on Slacker, and also quite ok now on USB and FM. Anyway Thanks Tesla! I think this is much closer to my expectations.

 

[Blurry_Eyed]

I recently received 6.2 (2.4.153) and these are my observations. Note, I did no objective measurements (No Sound Pressure Level metering and no use of real time frequency response analysis mic/software systems. Also, I have an aftermarket sound install (Reus - Still use the stock Tesla door speakers, but have upgraded A pillar tweeters and a center tweeter for presence on the back of the interior rear view mirror as well as custom subs in the trunk with separate power amps) so I'm going to try to keep my comments fairly generic and objective so people have a sense of what Tesla might have done with the audio coding in the latest update. Also these comments will primarily pertain to the cars that have premium audio. I would think that Tesla has different coding for the Standard Audio and the Premium Audio. But you can infer the adjustments that they have made to the premium audio system would be similar in scope to the standard audio setup.

I noticed that the mid and low bass EQ has been tweaked. I believe somewhere in the 80 to 120Hz range a bit of a boost was added. I also believe that a boost in the 20Hz to 60 Hz range was done, but it was not as much as was done in the 80-120Hz area. My speculation is that the Sub that Tesla uses in their premium audio package was not having a smooth frequency response (which may have been manifesting itself as 'weak' bass) to listeners. The bump in the 80-120Hz range was needed to get the sub to have a stronger and smoother response. If they adjusted the bass response in the premium package, it would make logical sense that they are very sensitive to the mid and low bass response in the standard cars without a Sub in the trunk by tweaking the EQ response from the stock door speakers. That would seem to be confirmed by Knobby's observations.

In terms of the high frequencies, what I've experienced is what I'd call a less 'digital' or harsh sound. Tesla said they were going to improve their Audio Codec's, so they may have done something in that range of the sound. But in mellowing it out a bit, I also sense that the sound clarity was compromised a bit in terms of definition and depth. Something akin to putting some gauze over the tweeters to mellow out some harshness. But boosting the High band on the eq about 3.5 dB for my setup helps bring some clarity back with out impacting the smoothness of the frequency response too much for me.

The overall frequency response of the system appears to have been tweaked. As I previously mentioned, there is a boost somewhere in the 60 to 120Hz range, also a bit of tweaking in the mid range frequencies between 600 hz and 1.2kHz. And either some rolling in the higher ranges beyond 6kHz, or some type of adjustment to the audio codecs that give the impression that there is a bit of cut in the higher frequency ranges (vs. what was there before).

I haven't done much testing of the surround implementation as I'm personally pleased with the more forward sound stage that Tesla has chosen to mimic. My very quick subjective impression on the rear speakers in the hatch is that they are still basically presence speakers and not involved much in the overall presentation. Not much done to the rear speaker response (if anything) So for those of you that wish for a more enveloping sound, you will have to look to do some more radical adjustments to the stock systems to achieve what you want.

If you are curious, I have an 8 inch sub and a 10 inch sub in the trunk each with independent amps and a master control on the side of the drivers seat so I can adjust the sub levels independent of the touch screen three band EQ controls. I can adjust the crossover frequencies at the amp level as well as adjust the gain controls on each amp. Prior to 6.2 I felt that I had adjusted my subs to have a fairly smooth frequency response, but on 6.2 I definitely have to go back to the amps and make some adjustments. I definitely have a bit of a bump in my bass in that 80-120Hz range now so I'll have to cut the gain a bit on my mid bass sub and possibly tweak the crossovers a bit to get my bass to be smooth again.

Hope that helps give a sense of what may have changed with 6.2 in terms of Audio. As with anything audio 'good' or 'bad' is subjective, but I think the changes they made are good and I believe Tesla is committed to continuing to tweak the audio to get it 'better' (as they perceive it) over time. The difficult thing for people who put in an aftermarket system and don't have the knowledge or skills to tweak it after it's installed is that this Tesla's adjustments can take a really good sounding aftermarket system and totally change the characteristics of it. To get it adjusted you would have to go back to the installer and ask the to tweak the EQ's and crossovers again. Not a big problem, but something to be aware of if you do install an aftermarket system. Fortunately I'm able to get into my system and make adjustments and get it to sound pleasing to me what ever Tesla does.

 

[EarlyAdopter]

In terms of the high frequencies, what I've experienced is what I'd call a less 'digital' or harsh sound. Tesla said they were going to improve their Audio Codec's, so they may have done something in that range of the sound. But in mellowing it out a bit, I also sense that the sound clarity was compromised a bit in terms of definition and depth. Something akin to putting some gauze over the tweeters to mellow out some harshness. But boosting the High band on the eq about 3.5 dB for my setup helps bring some clarity back with out impacting the smoothness of the frequency response too much for me.

Try it with Dolby on now. The Dolby processing has been significantly improved in 6.2 to something that actually improves the sound quality and sound stage, rather than destroying them as it had previously. I find that on 6.2 it helps eliminate that "gauze" feeling without overboosting or distorting the sound quality. I actually think it sound more natural with it on than off now. You'll probably not need to boost the high band with it on.

 

[gene]

I'm personally hoping they make the stereo actually sound better with Dolby on, as opposed off, the way it is now....

I'm 35 years in hi-end audio business, plus I am a violinist. Your system will always sound better with Dolby off. Most direct path from the original recording with as little processing screwing things up obviously has to be better. The best audio products you can get offer zero tone control, zero processing and hopefully an analog source.