Ive been reading through the forums and as I understand there is no option to shuffle your songs/folders from your usb drive, I'm wondering is this still true on current cars / firmware of if this has been resolved on the new firmware?
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Have they fixed shuffling songs on usb devices?
- Thread starter Tech_Guy
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thecloud
As rhythm raced inside, the ship came alive
The Shuffle option was added over a year ago. it works fine now (just went and verified this; I'm on 7.1, version 2.17.37.)
The thing to remember is that shuffle works within the current browsing category. "Songs" is usually where you want to begin, since it includes all songs on the USB device. If you're in an Album, then it will only shuffle songs within that album. Once the song starts playing, switch over to the Now Playing tab and make sure the shuffle icon is selected (it turns blue.)
The thing to remember is that shuffle works within the current browsing category. "Songs" is usually where you want to begin, since it includes all songs on the USB device. If you're in an Album, then it will only shuffle songs within that album. Once the song starts playing, switch over to the Now Playing tab and make sure the shuffle icon is selected (it turns blue.)
Thanks for confirming that for me, most of the posts about it where older so I was hopeful it had been fixed!! I placed my order yesterday for my MS P90DL... CANT WAIT!
BertL
Active Member
OP, congrats on your order. VERY EXCITING! ...and as @thecloud says, random works fine and USB music for the most part is OK. It's what I listen to 99.9% of the time I'm in my MS.
...not to burst your excitement bubble, but for your planning purposes, know that USB music still has a number of other unresolved firmware bugs, including my #1 issue: phantom playing when your car is off (beyond loosing your place in a song or audiobook you may have been playing, if you don't take preventive measures before exiting MS, I've had it add an additional 2-3 mi/day to the normal vampire loss), and if you go crazy with too many songs on a large USB stick, you can cause other slowdown/responsiveness issues with the 17" (Nav, etc) which can only be resolved with a hard reset of the CID. ...then of course there are some of our USB wish list items so an owner does not have to workaround the present problematic and minimal design, but I won't go there as it's covered in a number of other threads.
...not to burst your excitement bubble, but for your planning purposes, know that USB music still has a number of other unresolved firmware bugs, including my #1 issue: phantom playing when your car is off (beyond loosing your place in a song or audiobook you may have been playing, if you don't take preventive measures before exiting MS, I've had it add an additional 2-3 mi/day to the normal vampire loss), and if you go crazy with too many songs on a large USB stick, you can cause other slowdown/responsiveness issues with the 17" (Nav, etc) which can only be resolved with a hard reset of the CID. ...then of course there are some of our USB wish list items so an owner does not have to workaround the present problematic and minimal design, but I won't go there as it's covered in a number of other threads.
BertL
Active Member
While I agree it's a huge annoyance seeing the wrong album art much of the time, esp if it's not a current or popular album, I personally don't believe it's a bug ... As much as it's just the way Gracenotes tries to offer up something most of the time if it can't find a better match -- e.g. it's why sometimes a picture of an artist (or someone or something else) shows up instead of an album cover.Now, should Tesla offer USB users a mechanism to display their own album art and perhaps use Gracenotes only if a specified piece of album art is not attached with the track? Sure, but IMHO that's a new requirement, vs a bug. I distinguish between the two because of my belief Tesla first owes it to customers to resolve firmware bugs no different than fixing a hardware problem like we expect and it seems Tesla generally delivers via a SC. I then secondarily suggest new capabilities or changes to design choices like the present exclusive use of Gracenotes. Peace.
Most of the time it doesn't show any artwork. Also it tends to show the latest loaded songs, and not older ones. That is, if I put some new songs on, the artwork will show, but some songs that previously had artwork will no longer have it.
When I got the car firmware 4.1, maybe 90% of the songs showed artwork, now maybe 20%. And I doubt it's because Gracenotes doesn't have them as I put the thumb drive into a loaner and most of the artwork showed up (even though there were a few mistakes). There's some problem with how the artwork is fetched over time. The Service Centre wasn't helpful for this (and i really wouldn't expect them to be, as audio isn't their real function).
BertL
Active Member
I don't have the same problem as you. I rarely have a "blank note symbol" being displayed while USB music is playing, but I do perhaps half the time have something displayed that has nothing to do with the actual track, album or artist(s) involved. FWIW, the Gracenotes oddities appear about the same for me if I change the high-level folder name when I add or change songs on my USB stick or not. I suspect our music tastes may be quite different given your previous photo, so that may be part of why Gracenotes is better or worse for each of us. Again, I agree, it would just be best if Tesla would use album art if it's provided with the track so we could see what we intend -- it would even save Tesla data costs on the LTE connection not having to look-up and download Gracenotes images if they did.
doctorwho
Active Member
BertL
Active Member
@jerry33: This won't solve your (or anyone's) problem, but here are some thoughts and a more specific recommendation that may help:
My theory as to what is happening is something along these lines: MS has a fixed amount of memory available in the CID for things like Nav history, Bookmarks, Contacts, Calendar items, buffered Gracenotes images, and for some of the USB track information it scans from a USB device each time you insert it and that MS then uses to figure out the title, genre, artist, etc info for it's built-in menus and playback. While I doubt any person on this forum has anything more than speculation on the detail, MS has both not documented for owners and then perhaps consistently established limits in it's firmware on how many of those things it can have at one time -- along with the interaction between them -- before it exceeds what memory the CID does have. There is no secondary hard disk being used for "paging" to create a larger virtual memory environment like on laptop/desktop/commercial computers -- so be that as it's no different than how our smartphones and tablets operate. Some of us have seen when the CID slows down, it can be resolved for a time by rebooting the CID (which likely fixes at least some of the working memory issues, beside fixing something else that went wrong in the code); by manually eliminating excessive Nav history; and in my case reducing the number of tracks on my USB stick. With all that, the question becomes not what SHOULD MS do, but what is Tesla's firmware really doing when it runs out of memory for those of us that may inadvertently help cause it to happen? I suspect when the Tesla Infotainment firmware runs out of memory, it manifests itself in different ways depending how each owner has used and is using their Infotainment system, including perhaps in your case, stopping trying to pull down more Gracenotes cover art -- that would explain why your USB stick and album art displays in a different car. To additionally support that POV, I know when I was running with about half my iTunes library on a USB stick, I had a lot more situations with the default "note in a box" graphic appearing when playing USB music than I do today, as well as more random stuttering and strange 17" CID reboots.
My point and summary being -- each of our unique combination how we are using CID memory because of the Apps we use AND how many tracks we do or don't maintain on 1 or 2 USB devices, combined with one or more places where Tesla may not be handling maximum thresholds correctly in their firmware or they have "memory leakage issues", causes other problems to happen -- sometimes with other CID functions that you wouldn't expect should be failing. (FWIW, my former vehicles all had documented and firmware-enforced maximums for the number of saved Nav history items, max number of contacts and length of fields it would sync with your smartphone, a clip-level as to how many USB tracks it would scan and utilize, along with a maximum folder depth that would allow tracks to be found when scanning new USB devices. Tesla does none of those things.)
So, back to my recommendation. Again, it won't solve your issues, but it may ease or workaround the frustration you're having, as I went through some of this myself in a painful set of multi-week trial-and-error trying to improve my own situation a few months ago. I would:
My theory as to what is happening is something along these lines: MS has a fixed amount of memory available in the CID for things like Nav history, Bookmarks, Contacts, Calendar items, buffered Gracenotes images, and for some of the USB track information it scans from a USB device each time you insert it and that MS then uses to figure out the title, genre, artist, etc info for it's built-in menus and playback. While I doubt any person on this forum has anything more than speculation on the detail, MS has both not documented for owners and then perhaps consistently established limits in it's firmware on how many of those things it can have at one time -- along with the interaction between them -- before it exceeds what memory the CID does have. There is no secondary hard disk being used for "paging" to create a larger virtual memory environment like on laptop/desktop/commercial computers -- so be that as it's no different than how our smartphones and tablets operate. Some of us have seen when the CID slows down, it can be resolved for a time by rebooting the CID (which likely fixes at least some of the working memory issues, beside fixing something else that went wrong in the code); by manually eliminating excessive Nav history; and in my case reducing the number of tracks on my USB stick. With all that, the question becomes not what SHOULD MS do, but what is Tesla's firmware really doing when it runs out of memory for those of us that may inadvertently help cause it to happen? I suspect when the Tesla Infotainment firmware runs out of memory, it manifests itself in different ways depending how each owner has used and is using their Infotainment system, including perhaps in your case, stopping trying to pull down more Gracenotes cover art -- that would explain why your USB stick and album art displays in a different car. To additionally support that POV, I know when I was running with about half my iTunes library on a USB stick, I had a lot more situations with the default "note in a box" graphic appearing when playing USB music than I do today, as well as more random stuttering and strange 17" CID reboots.
My point and summary being -- each of our unique combination how we are using CID memory because of the Apps we use AND how many tracks we do or don't maintain on 1 or 2 USB devices, combined with one or more places where Tesla may not be handling maximum thresholds correctly in their firmware or they have "memory leakage issues", causes other problems to happen -- sometimes with other CID functions that you wouldn't expect should be failing. (FWIW, my former vehicles all had documented and firmware-enforced maximums for the number of saved Nav history items, max number of contacts and length of fields it would sync with your smartphone, a clip-level as to how many USB tracks it would scan and utilize, along with a maximum folder depth that would allow tracks to be found when scanning new USB devices. Tesla does none of those things.)
So, back to my recommendation. Again, it won't solve your issues, but it may ease or workaround the frustration you're having, as I went through some of this myself in a painful set of multi-week trial-and-error trying to improve my own situation a few months ago. I would:
- Manually delete old MS Nav history
- Ensure I had not gone crazy with hundreds of Contacts being loaded to my MS from my smartphone -- set a reasonable threshold on your smartphone as to which ones are really required. (My former vehicles had a maximum of 2K contacts for each paired smartphone, but with Tesla allowing address information, who knows how that adds to CID memory consumption.)
- Ensure I only had a few Internet bookmarks stored on the CID -- not some crazy big number
- Ensure I'm not going crazy with way-too-many calendar entries and notes being sync'd to my MS, even though the maximum is just 2-days worth
- Temporarily remove my one (or two) USB devices
- Reboot my 17" CID
- Rebuild a single USB music stick with these constraints:
- As few levels of directory depth (parent/children folder construct) as you can. My previous vehicles had maximums of 6 or 8 in this regard. Depending how Tesla has written their firmware, this could unnecessarily cause significantly more CID memory use than you really need to keep your library organized for your purpose inside MS.
- Try running with less total tracks on your USB device. If you are running with thousands of tracks, I know I was having more problems at 16K, 14K, 12K, and 10K, than I do with just a few hundred like many owners likely run with (especially if they are internet music streaming fanatics, which I am not), or the ~6K tracks I have settled-in and run with now.
- Change the name of the upper-most root parent folder on the USB stick each and every time you change track content further down in the folder structure, if it's anything other than just adding tracks to the same stick. This is especially important if you do things like change genre on a track. The USB scan Tesla is doing does not pick up all changes you may make unless the folder names change -- I believe they do this to try and speed up subsequent rescans of what MS thinks is the same USB stick with same contents, but it's not a perfect implementation and can really make you shake your head wondering what's going on.
- Put that USB stick back into your MS and give it a go. Hopefully you have better results. I have, since I've done these preventive measures.
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BertL
Active Member
Without knowing further symptoms, your issue may be because of the way MS does not handle "album artist" correctly. If you run a Mac, "TeslaTunes" can offer help in this regard, or check out my article on my personal website to see if it offers any assistance. I tried to document a bunch of things I learned from TMC and my own trial-and-error there. I have many compilations and don't have as big of a problem any more these days.
I have had a lot of stuttering problems with usb music. The Austin service center blamed it on my usb stick, a SanDisk UltraFit 128gb. It had about 4000 FLAC songs on it. They suggested removing the one pdf file on it and reformatting as EXT4 and copying my music back it again. I did so. Things were no better. Then my touchscreen went black and non-responsive. It would not scroll wheel reset. Only after removing the device and waiting about 5 minutes would it resume operation. So, while I think FLAC files from a usb stick sound better, I am going back streaming from my iPhone for a while. The service center acknowledged that the system does have problems with memory leaks. But they want to make it all my fault.
1. There are about 200 contacts on the phone.
2 and 3 are always minimal (Less than five bookmarks and ten calendar entries for two days).
4 and 5 I have tried, but that seems to make no difference.
6. All songs are either on root or one level down.
I've never tried renaming the root directory, but that's perhaps a good idea.
All I've ever done is add tracks.
There are less than 1,200 tracks. (12 GB)
I'll work through these as i get a chance.
thecloud
As rhythm raced inside, the ship came alive
thecloud
As rhythm raced inside, the ship came alive
I occasionally see the same problem that rluciano mentioned, and it happened again tonight. I have roughly 1000 FLAC files on a 64GB USB stick (formatted as FAT32, IIRC.) These are the noticeable symptoms:
1. Song playback starts to stutter frequently.
2. The ability to toggle playback on or off by pressing the left scroll wheel no longer functions, for any playback source including the radio (it still works as a volume control, though.)
3. Shuffle and continuous play no longer work; playback just stops when the end of a song is reached.
Rebooting the CID did not fix things up immediately. I had to subsequently remove the USB stick and then reboot. After the second reboot, I tried turning the radio on and off with the left scroll wheel, and this time it worked. So I reinserted the thumb drive, it loaded, and continuous playback of songs is now working again as well.
A large memory leak (or an unbounded cache) could certainly explain these symptoms, but it's just speculation. I'm going to try putting a much smaller number of tracks onto the drive, say around 8GB worth, then play them more often on shuffle. If the problem reproduces again relatively soon, then it might be related to how much song data is processed rather than how many files are on the USB drive.
1. Song playback starts to stutter frequently.
2. The ability to toggle playback on or off by pressing the left scroll wheel no longer functions, for any playback source including the radio (it still works as a volume control, though.)
3. Shuffle and continuous play no longer work; playback just stops when the end of a song is reached.
Rebooting the CID did not fix things up immediately. I had to subsequently remove the USB stick and then reboot. After the second reboot, I tried turning the radio on and off with the left scroll wheel, and this time it worked. So I reinserted the thumb drive, it loaded, and continuous playback of songs is now working again as well.
A large memory leak (or an unbounded cache) could certainly explain these symptoms, but it's just speculation. I'm going to try putting a much smaller number of tracks onto the drive, say around 8GB worth, then play them more often on shuffle. If the problem reproduces again relatively soon, then it might be related to how much song data is processed rather than how many files are on the USB drive.
doctorwho
Active Member
Play by folder works of you move all the songs on a compilation album manually into a single folder
BertL
Active Member
Yes, I've had the same issue, and it did require removal of the USB stick prior to reboot to get any audio including FM to play again. I do not use FLAC (generally M4A), and I play on USB random shuffle most of the time I'm in my MS.
My personal view is beyond likely memory challenges (both coding-wise and/or not having documented and more rigid limits enforced by their firmware to ensure solid operation of the entire CID):
- even with audio compression hardware-assist, there still seem to occasionnally be issues where either audio is not being sufficiently pre-cached to keep it playing continuously (have you ever had an inadvertent brief pause or two vs longer studdering that clears itself?), or there are more complex task priority issues going on where audio is not consistently prioritized with sufficient resources
- general USB support is not as robust as it needs to be -- esp when devices being inserted can cause other issues or removal of a physical USB device is a (standard) step in some problem resolution as reported in other threads interacting with 800# tech support and SC
BertL
Active Member
Yes. Issue when using the MS USB "Album" tab for playback (I assume that is what you and @thecloud are doing), is MS creates its list in that tab by appending the MP3-Album(Title) + (Track)Artist tags together. While MP3-Album is correct, Tesla uses the wrong Artist tag, which causes albums with varying artists on different tracks of the same physical album (e.g. compilations, Broadway, etc) to show as multiple albums when you playback using the built-in Album tab, rendering this tab useless for many music types beyond simple albums with a single artist -- assuming of course one has tagged their music the way the tags are intended to be used. If you put a specific album all in it's own folder on your USB stick, sure, playing back by folder will work since tags are not being used, but some of the other MS USB playback tabs will remain messed-up because of how Tesla scans and categorizes each track still using the tags.
Briefly, the MP3 "Artist Tag" is where one should record the names of all artists for a particular track, whereas "Album Artist" is where one should generally record the single primary artist or group for the entire album. On an album with a single artist, both tags are the same, or "Album Artist" defaults to "Artist" when it's not specified in well-behaved apps. If you have a compilation, "Artist" will list all the major artists for that particular track (e.g. on one track you may have Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong; and another track have Ella Fitzgerald & The Ink Spots), whereas the "Album Artist" tag would be just Ella Fitzgerald on all tracks in this case so it all sorts and can be searched correctly everywhere.
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