Maximum Number of Audio Tracks on USB Drive

[rudholm]

I realize there has already been a lot of discussion of the various shortfalls of playing music from a USB drive, but there's one issue I'm having that I haven't been able to find in a prior thread.

I have about 400GB of music files --about 20,000 tracks (mostly FLACs from when I ripped my CD collection). The car indexes the files pretty quickly and re-indexes it when I change the USB drive.

The problem is that it doesn't seem to index all the files. I don't know how many it has indexed because there doesn't seem to be a way to get a total available track count, but a lot of CDs are just entirely missing from the UI, even though I have verified that they are on the USB drive.

Anyone else encounter this problem? Anyone know what the limit is?

Obviously, there should be no practical limit, but we can just add that to the list of problems with USB audio.

 

[flashflooder]

I can't even get FLAC files to play without abruptly stopping mid song, or skipping back/forward randomly. So consider yourself lucky haha.

Not sure if it's just the way I ripped the files, or what.

 

[rudholm]

I can't even get FLAC files to play without abruptly stopping mid song, or skipping back/forward randomly. So consider yourself lucky haha.

Not sure if it's just the way I ripped the files, or what.

I had problems with the audio when I tried a 1TB Patriot flash drive. It sounded like buffer underruns. I switched to an SSD and it's fine. The flash drive should have been fine, the FLAC files are only about 768kbps, which it's nothing for a USB flash drive to sustain.

 

[sduck]

I'm not sure there is a published number for the songs that the car will catalog - tesla doesn't seem willing or able to publish even the basic specs about how the usb system works. You might try a ssd drive, the increased speed might help with cataloging. And if you can, try formatting to ext4, that seems to work better with the car as it's the native file system. I have an ssd formatted in ext4 and it's really fast and works almost perfectly (at least as well as the system will let it), although I don't have more than 20-40gb on there at any given time.

 

[srs5694]

This is extremely wild speculation, and so probably won't work, but you might try using two separate drives or partitioning one drive into two (or more) music partitions and splitting your library across multiple drives or partitions. I have no idea if the Tesla's music system would recognize multiple disks, so this might fail in a big way; but if there's a per-filesystem limit to the number of files Tesla's player can index, but if it can handle multiple filesystems, this approach should work around the problem. Of course, writing that much data to a device will take a while, so it'll be a nuisance to try it. I suppose you could start with two partitions on any old USB drive and just a few tracks on each to see if the Tesla will recognize two partitions.

 

[rudholm]

This is extremely wild speculation, and so probably won't work, but you might try using two separate drives or partitioning one drive into two (or more) music partitions and splitting your library across multiple drives or partitions. I have no idea if the Tesla's music system would recognize multiple disks, so this might fail in a big way; but if there's a per-filesystem limit to the number of files Tesla's player can index, but if it can handle multiple filesystems, this approach should work around the problem. Of course, writing that much data to a device will take a while, so it'll be a nuisance to try it. I suppose you could start with two partitions on any old USB drive and just a few tracks on each to see if the Tesla will recognize two partitions.

Indeed, I had the same hunch. I'm going to give it a try when I get the car back from the detail shop. I know the car supports more than one filesystem on a drive since I have the TeslaCam FAT32 partition on the same device as the EXT4 partition that houses my Music directory. I should be able to answer the "Will it index audio files from more than one partition?" and "If so, is the file count limit global, or per filesystem?" questions this evening.

 

[RScottyL]

Not sure if this relates to music files, but as far as files in general:


FAT32

• Maximum disk size: 2 terabytes
• Maximum file size: 4 gigabytes
• Maximum number of files on disk: 268,435,437
• Maximum number of files in a single folder: 65,534

 

[danox574]

Hi - I can tell you that 20,000 should not surpass the music player's capability. My backend FLAC library is growing and about once every two weeks, I do a fresh dump through this process:

1. Use a modified version of TeslaTags to retag my library to be compatible
2. Convert the entire library to .mp3 VBR at a bit rate I like
3. Embed art from folder.jpg files
4. Scrub the folder.jpg, hidden files and FLACs
5. Copy to a USB

My current pass had 29,170 songs, and I have never found a missing title. If the limit was below 20,000, I should probably myself have something like 40% missing songs, and I know I don't. It is possible, but I'd guess very unlikely that limits would be different for file type.

I would suggest pulling a known missing album's files out of the filesystem and putting it on another thumbdrive by itself. If it doesn't read then, you have some abnormalities in your FLAC file (which I have seen on various platforms), and you can attempt a lossy conversion as a test, or better yet, use something to convert FLAC to another lossless format and back to FLAC and you might find out they work after than (freshly written headers and tags from a recent software package).

If you find that the file won't read from your device when in the presence of 20,000 other files but reads fine if it's the only file, I'd start trying different media/storage, and if that doesn't do anything, we may very well have an abnormality in the player specific to FLAC.

 

[BioSehnsucht]

If it takes a long time to find the music files after startup or reconnecting USB, I would suggest (if it's within your technical expertise) to use ext4 filesystem to store the music files instead of FAT32. I've tested this on my Model 3 and it was noticeably quicker with only a few GB of mostly mp3s with some FLAC, I'm sure tens of thousands of FLAC would index even faster.

This is one of the reasons why if I ever finish my own variation on the TeslaUSB thing it's going to be using ext4 for the music partition instead of FAT32 (and just rely on using NFS/SMB over WiFi to transfer the files rather than plugging it into my Windows desktop)...

 

[DaiPlusPlus]

Use a modified version of TeslaTags to retag my library to be compatible

Oh hai - I wrote TeslaTags - can I ask what modifications you made? Would you be interested in sharing those back (as a PR on GitHub?) so others can benefit?

 

[Charlan83]

I realize there has already been a lot of discussion of the various shortfalls of playing music from a USB drive, but there's one issue I'm having that I haven't been able to find in a prior thread.

I have about 400GB of music files --about 20,000 tracks (mostly FLACs from when I ripped my CD collection). The car indexes the files pretty quickly and re-indexes it when I change the USB drive.

The problem is that it doesn't seem to index all the files. I don't know how many it has indexed because there doesn't seem to be a way to get a total available track count, but a lot of CDs are just entirely missing from the UI, even though I have verified that they are on the USB drive.

Anyone else encounter this problem? Anyone know what the limit is?

Obviously, there should be no practical limit, but we can just add that to the list of problems with USB audio.

I had this same problem with my audi and I never was able to figure it out. so far I am enjoying the streaming options available in the UI but this is definitely a concern for me going forward as i have a rather large music collection as well