Sounds like you have "The Jukebox from Hell" there.... sometimes scale works against you no matter how you prep for it.
Pretty unwieldy... not a criticism but rather an observation. I have my tunes on 3 32GB USBs in a switched port harmonica. Choose one of the USB's per day and run on shuffle.... always surprised.... directory is quickly built in perhaps under a minute... that's how I roll and it works great for me. Obviously your use case is different I suspect. Given the state of affairs... it may be prudent to prep your music in a similar fashion? It's like a box of chocolates.... ;-)
BTW, I think Tesla's media search function submits the search string to the "cloud"... perhaps that is why the USB is and will probably never be searchable... whatever "service" is doing the search is not aware of what is on our USB's or Phones etc.
What we need is a smart USB stick / appliance with voice recognition that does the search and presents the results to the Tesla media player as a subset of the whole media library.
So, I really appreciate the suggestion. Here is where I came from. I had an Empeg for 16 years in five different vehicles. It had a 266mhz arm processor and 16MB of RAM (that's megabytes). It could handle well into the 200GB range of music and 50k tracks before some 3rd party hackers had to start upgrading them to 32MB. It's literal limitation was the amount of hard drive storage you could add (2 x 2.5" IDE drives, the largest those ever got was 160GB I think).
All that to say I think the hardware limitation argument is bollocks. I understand that there is increased overhead due to media art information potentially (so allow for it to be turned off?). But it's just an all around disappointment to have something so central and integral to your driving experience, actively work against you for 2 years. When I found out that the Tesla couldn't do Playlists, I broke up my collection by genre to different storage volumes on the SSD hard drive (4 allowed per drive). This way, I get some semblance of playlist support. So to answer your question, it could be worse, everything could be on one volume!
I guess I'm still under the desire to want high-quality music, with no compromises as to what I can listen to. My collection is made up of stuff I already know I like. And we won't always have free access to cloud services on the Tesla (I super appreciate you providing it right now Tesla!), nor is adequate cell coverage a guarantee where I go. And as someone else mentioned, what if the content I would like to listen to isn't even available streaming? Audiobooks are a great example of that. One day I may want to listen to Harry Potter, then next day Issac Asimov.
So back to your suggestion, it's not a bad one. However, I'd rather not have to swap out 6 different USB sticks depending on what I want to listen to. That's exactly how it was with CD's, tapes, 8 tracks, just on a different scale. We are finally to the point where our technology can be sophisticated enough that it doesn't stand in our way or cause us pause. The rest of the car is basically like this, why can't the media and NAV system be this way as well?
The Media App improvements are like we made several big steps forward, including some much needed little steps in USB support, but then we took out alpha shortcuts and started arranging albums alphabetically, and it's like 1 big step back for USB. Someone suggested their testing didn't include anyone with large USB usage. Tesla: Please sign me up, I am part of that group that uses USB heavily and I'd really really like to help.
