Lessons learned about USB audio

[dsss]

+1000 to this. The multitude of longstanding issues plaguing the USB playback experience is far and away the most disappointing thing about my 3.

I have a decent number of songs on my USB 3 drive and it always takes 6-10 minutes to rescan every time I start the car.
Compounding that with the issues listed in the other "Comprehensive USB bug thread" at 90 pages and counting over in the S forum such as:
Playback Gaps (is this 1998?)
Incorrect Tag Reading, esp when using folder view
No auto-resume

Etc.... The USB platform barely qualifies as alpha, yet these problems have been around for YEARS and Elon doesn't seem to care. I do wonder if we all started sending Twitter notes directed to him, if we might get his attention. The is the only "bring your own music" solution offered (not counting bluetooth) with decent fidelity available to Tesla owners. Not having it work is a really bad look.

 

[V__2]

Just to add another data point, I have put about 30GB of MP3, around 6500 songs on a USB and start is about instantaneous. Do not really use elaborate tags in MP3 but instead having a deep sub-folders structure as I did in the days when playing an MP3 on the computer required to close all programs as CPU could not handle the decoding.

Would suggest getting a new ($15 usually for 200+MB/s read speed USB3 drive) and try with it to see if the slowness is due to processing and indexing the catalog or data retrieval from USB drive.

 

[iMoe]

elon wants us to listen to farts instead.

Hey, don't diss the farts. Their burring tunes speak to me in places I didn't know I had ears.

 

[Knightshade]

Just to add another data point, I have put about 30GB of MP3, around 6500 songs on a USB and start is about instantaneous. Do not really use elaborate tags in MP3 but instead having a deep sub-folders structure as I did in the days when playing an MP3 on the computer required to close all programs as CPU could not handle the decoding.

Would suggest getting a new ($15 usually for 200+MB/s read speed USB3 drive) and try with it to see if the slowness is due to processing and indexing the catalog or data retrieval from USB drive.

The USB ports on the Tesla are USB2... a faster drive literally can not help you here.

 

[Tiede]

The USB ports on the Tesla are USB2.

I've been looking everywhere to confirm this. Is this actually listed anywhere? The closest I've seen is someone deriving this based on some instructions in the model 3 owner's manual (which could change...)

 

[Knightshade]

I've been looking everywhere to confirm this. Is this actually listed anywhere? The closest I've seen is someone deriving this based on some instructions in the model 3 owner's manual (which could change...)

I mean, it COULD change, like they could swap in USB3 ports for new cars tomorrow, but today (and all days in the past) it's USB2.

https://www.tesla.com/content/dam/tesla/Ownership/Own/Model 3 Owners Manual.pdf

Page 21 in the current version specifies using USB2 cables. If the ports did anything that required USB3 devices or cables it'd say so.

 

[NickDeRoo]

Does audio need to be in any special folder, like TeslaCam?

 

[Kevy Baby]

Does audio need to be in any special folder, like TeslaCam?

No

 

[Durzel]

I honestly couldn't believe my eyes (ears) when I noticed that there was no gapless playback. Quite a lot of the music on my HDD are dance compilations that are one long continuous mix spread over several tracks, so it is quite jarring for it to just stop mid-mix for a second or so.

It seems clear to me that there isn't much likelihood of this changing any time soon, given how old this and other threads are. Strange, since it must surely be a trivial fix.

 

[Kevy Baby]

I honestly couldn't believe my eyes (ears) when I noticed that there was no gapless playback.

The UX of USB music is substandard.

It's really bad at remembering the playback point, especially when you have a lot of songs (I am over 7,000 currently).

There's a number of other details, but it is really sad when it can't even match the capabilities of the Ford Sync system in my old 2013 Taurus (which was quite dated itself).

I really wish Tesla would open up Car Play (Apple) and Android Auto.

 

[sduck]

I honestly couldn't believe my eyes (ears) when I noticed that there was no gapless playback. Quite a lot of the music on my HDD are dance compilations that are one long continuous mix spread over several tracks, so it is quite jarring for it to just stop mid-mix for a second or so.

At least it's better than it used to be. This is something that got "improved" fairly recently. The gaps now are just little hiccups - not a second or so - if you're getting gaps like that there's something wrong with your usb setup.

And yes, there's little hope of it getting much better - they implemented a series of little fixes over the last year, and at least it's usable and a ton better than it used to be. I started bugging them via email about the details of this on a weekly basis once I got my car almost 2 years ago, but have lately given up as several replies I got seemed to indicate that no-one was reading these things.

FWIW in my car the USB system always remembers where I am when I get back in the car.

 

[Durzel]

1 second was a bit hyperbolic.. I'm using a Samsung T5 SSD so I would presume it's going to be as fast as it can realistically be.

I would concur that there's only been one time I've got in the car and it hasn't remembered what track is playing and at what point, I don't really understand that complaint unless it's something that has been silently added recently.

 

[lUtriaNt]

i missed gapless playback!!! so i just use my phone mostly now with poweramp. the music drive is a good backup. plus on poweramp ive more control over the sound than i do through the car.

 

[sduck]

The bluetooth audio drivers in the car are pretty bad - so you're losing a lot of quality that way. Not everyone is going to hear it, but I've A-B tested bluetooth and usb playing the same files, and can hear a big difference. But yes, if you want gapless and better control over your playback bluetooth is the way to go.

 

[Durzel]

Yeah I'll stick with FLAC and small gaps I think.

 

[Kevy Baby]

FWIW in my car the USB system always remembers where I am when I get back in the car.

If you go to another source (such as a streaming service or radio), does it remember where you were? It NEVER does for me.

And I looked tonight: I have about 8,500 songs on the flash drive. I wonder if that is a contributing factor.

 

[drtimhill]

Hi guys, I want to share what I've learned about getting my music to read correctly on the media player through my USB flash drive. It's taken quite a bit of trial and error to get the media player to read everything as it should.

Disclaimer: this has worked out for me; and focuses on MP3 files (how my digital music is stored).

I'm using a Samsung 128GB low profile USB 3.0 flash drive in my Model 3, with about 69 GB worth of music on it. With this drive and this amount of music on it, the car can take anywhere from 10 seconds to 3 minutes reading or caching it (or whatever it's doing) before it lets me access it. It seemingly needs to do this every time I start the car, regardless if anything on the drive has been changed or if it was left in/removed. I think this is an area that Tesla can improve.


Normally, on my PC, phone, or my living room audio receiver, the music player software reads the ID3 tag to determine song order and album order. As such, the filenames of my digital songs weren't always so clean, but it was never a problem thanks to having organized IP3 tags. I use Mp3tag to organize my MP3 files. Tesla, for some reason, relies a lot on the actual filename to determine song order, and album order is ALPHABETICAL, which annoys me because I like seeing my artist discographies in order. The Tesla media controller is also a bit picky about how your numbers should be.
If your filenames start with 1., 2., --10., 11., etc, your songs will be a bit out of order. You need to have a 0 in front of a single digit (i.e. 01., 02.) unless the album has less than 10 songs in it. Also, you can have the numbers formatted like so

Regarding file names. There are a lot of tools out there that will rename song filenames using ID3 tags, which can help with the name problem you mentioned. iTunes (Mac/Windows) and Better Rename (Mac) are both able to so this. In fact, iTunes defaults to exactly the naming convention you need (two digit track number prefix).

Regarding file systems. I think Tesla chose the most common file system that was supported by the major operating systems. exFAT is problematical because there is some dispute as to ownership and royalties. NTFS is a non-starter as a read/write version of that file system is a nightmare, and so doesnt really apply outside of Windows. ext4 is tricky on Windows, and not very easy on Mac. So you are left with... "good" old FAT32.

 

[sduck]

If you go to another source (such as a streaming service or radio), does it remember where you were? It NEVER does for me.

No. But I only rarely if ever use other sources. I find it hard to deal with more than one primitive system at a time.