How Model S Organizes Music in the Media App

[Todd Burch]

When sorting by album in typical digital music players, an album with several guest artists or a compilation is treated as separate albums unless they have a common "Album Artist" in the metadata, which will tie them together, and treat the album as one.

Even though the songs on my external drive are set up this way, the Model S Media App is still listing these as separate albums when choosing the "Album" category to view music by album. As a result, I see album "XYZ" listed multiple times.

Anyone else seeing this, or am I doing something wrong?

 

[hbouw]

The Model S music player is different from other players in that it ignores the "Collection" and "Album Artist" tags. For it to consider songs to belong to the same album, the song artist must be the same for all songs belonging to the album.
As a solution (actually more like a workaround in my opinion), you can use an id3 tag editor like MP3tag to change the songs belonging to collections to:
1) (Optionally) append the song artist tag to the song title tag. That way no information gets lost.
2) Set the song artist tag to something like "various artists" or to the "main" artist name in case a compilation mostly features one artist with some guest performers contributing to some of the tracks.

 

[KurtR]

When sorting by album in typical digital music players, an album with several guest artists or a compilation is treated as separate albums unless they have a common "Album Artist" in the metadata, which will tie them together, and treat the album as one.

I think that's right but with one caveat, at least with respect to Mediamonkey, where tracks having a blank field for album artist are also grouped together and treated as being within a single album. In any case, I think Tesla has really screwed up the organizational aspects of the USB music interface by trying to do the wrong things, but ignoring the things they should do. For example, Tesla should never have let the Internet touch the USB music interface, or at least give us a setup option to NOT have album art downloaded and to NOT look up and add metadata from an Internet database. Tesla essentially repopulates every one of the 2000+ songs on my USB drive with metadata that I deliberately erased prior to storing it on the USB drive. Now I have to wade through several hundred useless album listings just to find the 25 or so that I actually listen to as albums. Everything else I just listen to by Artist since most musicians can't seem to get more then two or three good songs per album. I don't need to see album art, since listening to music is, well, an aural experience rather than a visual one, but it still kind of annoys me when they pull the wrong album art (which is quite a bit of the time). I also don't see why the touchscreen display should be cluttered with album art if you don't want it there - browsing would sure be faster without it.

Anyone competent enough to load music on a USB drive from a computer is competent enough to click a button to automatically populate metadata to the files from their computer, prior to downloading onto the USB drive - using any one of number of free programs that do the job at least as well as Tesla, so there was never any reason in the first place for Tesla to duplicate that capability except to add another showy gizmo that adds no capability the owner didn't already have. Instead it removes capabilities the owner previously had. Silly.

Yet, at the same time, they can't seem to add playlists and they can't organize compilation albums correctly, as you've already noted. Until recently, the car couldn't shuffle tracks and from my limited time driving the car, the set of songs you're shuffling through when you get home at night is lost when you start driving the next day, so that once the currently-playing song finishes, the media player just stops playing music. Since the car is always on at night, and if the USB drive stays in the car, why can't this information be preserved?

 

[KurtR]

Slight correction to the post above - today when I drove the car, the currently-playing list of songs continued from where I left off yesterday, so there must have just been some glitch earlier when the media player stopped.

 

[gubes]

So guys. For Instance:

Take an Album: Now That's What I Call Music! 85. Comes with 2 discs and is Various Artists.

I set up a Folder called: Now That's What I Call Music! 85

Then under that folder, I start each song with the number "01 Get Lucky" (and then I make sure that the 1st song of CD2 starts with a number after the last number of the song on CD1) But there is no artist name on the file in question - that would be too much of a pain to do for my entire music collection.

Will the system figure it out the name of the artist by the name of the song and the album its in?

I get my Model S in 5 days and I am trying to sort out my files on the USB in the best possible way.

Also each folder is just the Album name (don't necessarily include artist name), should I change that?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks