media 'loading error'

[milosmaill]

Frequently, when selecting a Spotify station, I get a 'loading error' message and a spinning arrow in the media center displayed over the selected media text.
Has anyone else had this problem? Service guy said this was due to lack of a wifi signal, but that's just nonsense.
Besides, it happens in my garage (where I have a strong wifi signal), and on the open road. No consistent pattern.

 

[RTPEV]

Welcome to the world of streaming!

I'm not a Spotify user, so I can't comment on how well (or not) Spotify works, but I get this all the time with TuneIn podcasts and radio stations, and occasionally with Slacker.

Usually with me it happens when I pull out of the garage and the car transitions from WiFi to LTE. It also happens on the road, where I suspect there is either a weak cell signal, or interference (it seems to happen as I drive past the airport).

I'm not sure what to tell you. It's a glitch in the streaming, and the software is not written well enough to handle it. It is very frustrating for me with TuneIn radio stations in particular because while I don't necessarily get the Loading Error (although sometimes I do), it skips horribly for about 3 minutes after I transition between WiFi and LTE as it tries to "catch up" to live. Really horrible software, but that's what I've come to expect in this modern world. Bluetooth connections, streaming on the phone and even TV sometimes glitches. You either have to live with it, wait for the software to improve, or listen to an actual radio station.

I will add one thing: I do try to tune into a particular TuneIn radio station that simply will not load wherever I am. Instead of a useful error message, I get the Loading Error. It's very consistent in that it NEVER works. Again, this is more a case of crappy software and/or the TuneIn service itself. But it's definitely not a hardware issue. It's just a fact of streaming life.

 

[milosmaill]

Thanks fr the comments. Yes (being a software guy) I am fully aware of the futility of fixing all the bugs. I too am assuming it is a s/w issue. You make a good point about transition from wifi to LTE. Wonder if tesla nerds have looked into that.
Still love the car, though.

 

[milosmaill]

Long term these kinds of bugs will affect sales. The larger community of drivers will not be as tolerant.

Has anyone become familiar with bug situation on Audi or or Ecars? Im curious how buggy they might be.

 

[RTPEV]

Thanks fr the comments. Yes (being a software guy) I am fully aware of the futility of fixing all the bugs. I too am assuming it is a s/w issue. You make a good point about transition from wifi to LTE. Wonder if tesla nerds have looked into that.
Still love the car, though.

Hell, my phone itself does a really poor job of handling the transition from WiFi to LTE. I have to either start up Waze and let it plan a route before I leave my driveway, or I have to wait until I am well down the street to put in my destination. If it's in the process of going through it's prompts and gets to the route calculation just as I am leaving my WiFi's range, I inevitably get "Oops, something went wrong" and I can't get out of that unless I kill the app and start it up again. Even my laptop seems to have trouble switching between ethernet and WiFi and being on one VPN versus another. It seems to be an inherent weakness in the networking drivers and their ability to handle multiple connections, which understandably is a complex situation when suddenly you have to open new network connections.

So in the end, I think the solution is to write the application software to be more tolerant of these glitches. In the case of my TuneIn radio stations, it might be something as simple as more buffering and timestamping packets. The podcast support is simply terrible, but one improvement would be to save the current podcast episode and position (something it apparently can do, because it does remember where I was when I get back in the car), and not completely give up if it loses a connection. In your case it needs to detect a failure more quickly, try an alternate, and then recover rather than just spinning forever.