Received 8.0 on my fully equipped early-build U.S.
- NEW + BUG REPORT: Imbedded Album Art now appears to be displayed when a track is played (that’s GREAT), and as an icon on Album/Song tags, but I’m finding it inconsistent.
- There can be a notable delay (several minutes) for some art to display, as I suspect as a lower priority, the firmware has to go out to the physical track, pull in and resize it if it’s not already cached. I can live with that, even though it's a bit unusual at first.
- I know my test tracks are compliant with imbedded art that works with iTunes, iOS Media Player, a number of other apps and via Bluetooth to my MS, but I’ve already found some will not display in the native Tesla USB interface even after several minutes of waiting. IDK yet what that issue may be — but I suspect the new interface is not handling some of the art that it believes is too big or we’ve got a new and different sort of memory constraint issue with this redesign.
- NEW BUG: I suspect Tesla has knowingly or unknowingly imposed a yet-to-be-documented limit on the number of tracks the USB media will support, or 8.0 firmware is reacting differently with larger libraries. WARNING TO THOSE WITH LARGE USB MUSIC LIBRARIES OR WHO REGULARLY SWITCH USB STICKS WITH ANY SUBSTANTIAL NUMBER OF TRACKS.
- I’ve got to spend a lot more time on this one day, but my existing stick of 6100 tracks, that worked well with 7.1, really does not with 8.0. The issue is, where initial scanning was a 15-20 min process when my USB stick was inserted or the CID was rebooted in 7.x, after 1 hour doing the same with 8.0, it’s not even 80% complete with the initial scan. The scanning process also appears at some point to become exponentially slower the more tracks that are scanned (it took 15 minutes to go from 68%-78%), indicating perhaps some memory constraints or leakage. Regardless, until Tesla resolves this, if I want to use USB, I have little choice but to substantially reduce the number of tracks to get scan time back down to something within reason.
- NEW BUG/REQUIREMENT: Access via Songs (Tracks). The alpha-index shortcut is gone, making scrolling intolerable if you have any number of tracks, esp since there is no search capability.
- We really do need a better balance of visionary features WITH real Customer needs and desires — and USB support that works for more than a few hundred tracks, please!
I wonder if the root cause of Tesla not addressing these issues isn't hardware related. The real time system operating the actual driving related aspects of the car (steering, battery charge/discharge, regenerative braking, motor control, cooling, etc.) obviously works very well, and hasn't needed an upgrade to the hardware since the cars release back in 2012. The hardware chosen must have been been locked in earlier, say 2011.
The media stuff is almost certainly running on a different processor, or processors. There have been tremendous leaps in both storage and processor speed since 2011. And any code handling any given users USB stick that is inserted is faced with the task of figuring out what is in those 6,100 (!) or more files. Not only what is in them, but when to try indexing them for search, and what to do if someone tries searching before the indexing gets done, etc. It could be that the current hardware simply isn't up to the task. Map rendering was also commented on earlier in the thread.
Given the massive trend in increasing processing power and storage, I'm wondering if Tesla foresaw that this might become an issue at some point. Maybe they know that their current hardware can't do everything they would like to have it do, so have made some minor improvements, but given up on a radical software improvement solution.
The silver lining might be that if they knew this would happen, they would have designed the hardware to allow for the most minimally invasive hardware upgrade path. So here we are 5 years after the original design was done. Maybe now that Tesla can buy a graphics engine that is 20x more powerful than the original one, with 10x as much storage, for 20% of the original cost, they might be able to design a low cost drop in solution that will make the leap from where things stand now to something really snappy? This could be why they are so far behind in the user interface area. Maybe they are focusing on the upgrade path I mentioned.
When the Model 3 comes out, the processing power of the onboard systems will have many times the capabilities of the 2013 Model S's. If you can avoid having the older flagship car (Model S) be eclipsed by the newer 1/2 price entry level car by simply swapping out the UI hardware for a reasonable cost, say $1,000, why not do it? Especially if the current design allows for that. Given the amount of time this gets discussed here, it seems like a reasonably priced upgrade that solves the problems would be gobbled up like there is no tomorrow...
RT