Picked up my Tesla Model S P85D 2 weeks ago. Wow! This is one amazing car. No more ICE for me! One thing I had to figure out is the music player though. My first impression was more than excellent as it can play internet radio (Slacker and TuneIn)! This works great for me as I can now listen to Dutch radio stations in my car (I live in CA).
However, when I then decided I wanted to listen to some of my own music, stored on my iPhone, reality sunk in... The Model S doesn’t support Apple’s iPod music USB interface. Of course you can listen through Bluetooth, however it forces you to use your phone to select songs (not recommended while driving) and compromises sound quality also.
What gives?
Obviously, storing my music on a USB stick was the way to go. I’d never used a USB stick in any of my cars before though so started browsing the internet (TeslaMotorsClub.com!) to find the best way. I quickly found out there are quite a few “gotchas” with Tesla’s implementation of the USB music player. The most important ones are:
1) No support for playlists
2) Albums becoming “fragmented” due to the Tesla player not using the “Album Artist” and “Compilation” tags to keep things organized like iTunes does.
Regarding the playlist support (or lack thereof), I really wanted some kind of workaround solution for that (until Tesla comes to senses and supports real playlists). I personally like to tag my favorite songs in iTunes with 4 or 5 stars and then listen to these “Top Rated” songs from a playlist, playing the songs in random order (luckily Tesla since recently supports Shuffle play). In a forum posting, I saw someone suggesting to mark your favorite songs by defining a unique “Genre” for them. As the Tesla Player can organize and play songs belonging to a certain Genre, I thought this was a great idea! Some “tweaking” is needed to go from the iTunes “stars rating” to a “Favorite” Genre in the Tesla Player however.
Regarding albums becoming “fragmented”, a good way to circumvent this is to make sure all songs on an album share one and the same artist name. Often, something like “Various Artists” is used if the Album contains a collection of songs performed by different artists. By appending the song names with the actual artist name for that specific song on the album, no information gets lost and the chance that the Tesla Player finds the correct Album Art image (it looks for those on the internet) may be higher. Also here, “tweaking” to get the songs from iTunes onto the USB with the right tags is needed.
As I converged on a good way to export songs from iTunes to the Tesla USB Player, I thought I’d summarize a “How To” here. Hope it’ll help someone!
This works great. But of course Tesla cannot expect all their drivers to be computer literate. Having proper support for Playlist would still be better. Hope Tesla reads this and plans to release update media player software with Playlist support soon.
Hope this is helpful,
Gra55h0pper.
However, when I then decided I wanted to listen to some of my own music, stored on my iPhone, reality sunk in... The Model S doesn’t support Apple’s iPod music USB interface. Of course you can listen through Bluetooth, however it forces you to use your phone to select songs (not recommended while driving) and compromises sound quality also.
What gives?
Obviously, storing my music on a USB stick was the way to go. I’d never used a USB stick in any of my cars before though so started browsing the internet (TeslaMotorsClub.com!) to find the best way. I quickly found out there are quite a few “gotchas” with Tesla’s implementation of the USB music player. The most important ones are:
1) No support for playlists
2) Albums becoming “fragmented” due to the Tesla player not using the “Album Artist” and “Compilation” tags to keep things organized like iTunes does.
Regarding the playlist support (or lack thereof), I really wanted some kind of workaround solution for that (until Tesla comes to senses and supports real playlists). I personally like to tag my favorite songs in iTunes with 4 or 5 stars and then listen to these “Top Rated” songs from a playlist, playing the songs in random order (luckily Tesla since recently supports Shuffle play). In a forum posting, I saw someone suggesting to mark your favorite songs by defining a unique “Genre” for them. As the Tesla Player can organize and play songs belonging to a certain Genre, I thought this was a great idea! Some “tweaking” is needed to go from the iTunes “stars rating” to a “Favorite” Genre in the Tesla Player however.
Regarding albums becoming “fragmented”, a good way to circumvent this is to make sure all songs on an album share one and the same artist name. Often, something like “Various Artists” is used if the Album contains a collection of songs performed by different artists. By appending the song names with the actual artist name for that specific song on the album, no information gets lost and the chance that the Tesla Player finds the correct Album Art image (it looks for those on the internet) may be higher. Also here, “tweaking” to get the songs from iTunes onto the USB with the right tags is needed.
As I converged on a good way to export songs from iTunes to the Tesla USB Player, I thought I’d summarize a “How To” here. Hope it’ll help someone!
- Get yourself a USB Flash Drive. Like many on the forums, I like the low-profile form factor ones. I’m using a SanDIsk Cruzer Fit 64GB: http://www.sandisk.com/products/usb/drives/cruzer-fit/ as it’s big enough to store my entire personal music collection.
- Download and install MP3Tag: http://www.mp3tag.de. This is what we will use to “reformat” the Tags from the way Apple iTunes uses them to something that works well for the Model S music player.
- Launch iTunes, and:
- Select to view “Playlists” (top menu bar in the iTunes window)
- Set the view to display a list of Songs (Select “Songs” in the pulldown menu in the right upper corner).
- Select your first playlist that you would like to “export” to the Tesla Model S
- Display a column with the contents of the “Comments” tag by right-clicking on the column header row (showing “Name”, “Time”, “Artist”, etc.) and then selecting “Comments” from the pull-down menu.
- Select all files in this Playlist (“Edit”->”Select All” from the menu). Then right-click on the selection and select “Get Info” from the pulldown menu
- In the “comments” field, enter a description for your Playlist, e.g. “Top Rated”. (This will later become the “Genre” that can be selected in the Model S Player to play our favorite songs)
- Press “OK” and wait for iTunes to do its thing
- Repeat the above steps to add a Comment identifying other Playlists you would like to export. I use: “Recently Added”, “Recently Played” and “Top Rated”. (Note that each song can only end up in one Genre on the Model S player so you may have to select your preferred one in case a song is part of multiple playlists).
- Quit iTunes
- Copy the albums/songs you want to export to your Tesla from your "iTunes Media/music" folder (go to “Preferences””->”Advanced” in iTunes if you’re unsure about the location of your iTunes Media folder) to a temporary folder. (I use a folder named “Tesla” on the Desktop and simply copy the *entire* “music” folder into it). Make sure this temporary destination folder has enough space!
- Launch MP3tag, and:
- Choose File->Change Directory and select the temporary folder you created in step 4.
- Right-click on the column header row and select the “Comments" tag for display
- Look of and delete and music videos. These won’t play in the Model S and just take up space. Enter “.m4v” in the "Filter” box at the bottom of the window. Then select the files found, and right-click “delete”. Clear the “Filter” box to display the regular music files
- Click “Actions”->”Actions” and create a new Action Group called “iTunes2Tesla”
- Edit this group to enter the contents in the picture below (make sure it matches exactly). For the “Format value “GENRE” actions, use your chosen Playlist descriptions from Step 3.
- Execute the iTunes2Tesla action on all files: Select all files and choose “Actions”->”iTunes2Tesla”
- Format the USB flash drive and put a folder with a name representing today’s date in its root. The reason for doing this is that Model S caches the tags in the files (e.g. artist name, song title, etc.). It’ll only re-read a file’s tags if the path/filename changes. By putting the files in a root-foler, all it takes is changing this folder name to force the car to re-read the tags.
- Copy files onto Flash Drive
- Install in car and enjoy!
This works great. But of course Tesla cannot expect all their drivers to be computer literate. Having proper support for Playlist would still be better. Hope Tesla reads this and plans to release update media player software with Playlist support soon.
Hope this is helpful,
Gra55h0pper.