Media player in 8.0 actually got worse (for local music)

[Ed Hart]

Add me to the list of folks who are not impressed by the new media interface.

I sent a note to Tesla suggesting that the media player is far to complex to set up. I said I would like to set it up at home on my computer, then have it loaded into the vehicle, either directly or through Tesla, if the latter must do it for security reasons. Once set up to my favorites, it should be easier to use and modify. Anyone have thoughts on this approach?

The XM Radio interface is a bit of a mess, but they know it and will fix it, I am sure.

BUT....Tesla really needs to do a post-mortem on this to figure out how they got here.

 

[jfeiner]

I use XM radio a bunch since it's the most convenient and when I'm looking for a game especially during the NFL season. However, the interface does not allow you to go to a specific channel number like it does on the FM and AM radios where you can slide a bar across to the station you want. The XM interface has nothing. The release notes say it has categories and such, but I can't find them. And when it says on my iPhone app for SiriusXM sports that my favorite team is playing on CH 225 and I'm on 80, there's no way to go to 225 other than hitting the forward button repeatedly 145 times. Why couldn't the voice command simply have a choice, "XM channel 225"?

 

[Festerfeet]

Oh dear, I hope the USB UI is fixed soon, we don't get Slacker/Spotify or a local equivalent in China, I have never got Tunein to work and Bluetooth from my phone only works sometimes and is not controllable without picking up the phone which is a safety issue.

This leaves me with USB or USB...please oh please fix this Tesla.

 

[Festerfeet]

Oh no...my X is at the service centre getting some gremlins sorted and I have just got a notification on the app that 'Software update is complete'. I hope they haven't just moved me to V8.0.

Heeeeeelp

 

[ArcAngel]

There is no question--this update is a disaster in many ways. I thought after waiting over a year for an overhaul we would finally get something more usable, easy to use and intuitive. Instead of adding Spotify and adding tighter phone connectivity (CarPlay, etc) we got this mess. It actually got worse for music playing, not better. Now if you are looking for a station or selection that is not in your favorites (which of course you need to scroll through) it's nearly unfindable, and that is not even mentioning how bad it is for the poor folks who use the USB option. They need to update this soon. When my lease is up I will go back to an ICE for better connectivity to my phone and ease of use for music if they don't fix this. Don't they realize how important this is to the driving experience?

 

[TexasEV]

There is no question--this update is a disaster in many ways. I thought after waiting over a year for an overhaul we would finally get something more usable, easy to use and intuitive. Instead of adding Spotify and adding tighter phone connectivity (CarPlay, etc) we got this mess. It actually got worse for music playing, not better. Now if you are looking for a station or selection that is not in your favorites (which of course you need to scroll through) it's nearly unfindable, and that is not even mentioning how bad it is for the poor folks who use the USB option. They need to update this soon. When my lease is up I will go back to an ICE for better connectivity to my phone and ease of use for music if they don't fix this. Don't they realize how important this is to the driving experience?

Sure it's important, but not nearly to the same degree as driving an EV rather than an ICE!

 

[contaygious]

Which email should we complain to?

 

[Festerfeet]

Sure it's important, but not nearly to the same degree as driving an EV rather than an ICE!

I agree and driving an EV is the main reason for me but Tesla set out not to build a good EV, they set out out to build a great car that people would want whatever their view was on carbon footprint and social responsibility.

They understood that to fulfil their goal they needed to appeal to a broad church of car buyers, the roadster was and is a great car but was a only ever going to appeal to a niche market. The S, X and all subsequent models have to compete with a much wider field of vehicles and being fast comfortable and having a decent range with Superchargers available for longer journeys goes part of the way to that goal. But there are other expectations from a modern vehicle.

One of the "must haves" for a large number of potential car buyers in the market for a vehicle in this price range is a good (and safe) UI and decent audio. To get this wrong will put off potential purchasers.

When BMW brought out the original version of iDrive a lot of my colleagues and staff were so frustrated and disappointed that they switched to Mercedes as soon as their company cars were up for renewal. Over a 3 year period we went from being 80% BMW, 20% Mercedes to 30%BMW 70% Mercedes and recurring reason given was because although the cars were comparable in many ways, Mercs had better and easier to use UIs and audio. MB sold us over 1,000 cars more because BMW screwed up.

Tesla build great cars and have a worthy goal but they need to broaden their appeal and not screw up when the competition are starting to look at the EV market seriously.

 

[Soundchasr]

Which email should we complain to?

I sent an email to NA sales. Not sure if that was the right one to use.

 

[Gizmotoy]

Wait. So if we have multiple albums from a single artist on a USB drive, and we select that artist from the media player, it produces a list of all the tracks from all the albums in alphabetical order? Are you kidding me?

There's no way this was even lightly tested by someone who uses a USB drive for music.

 

[ArcAngel]

Sure it's important, but not nearly to the same degree as driving an EV rather than an ICE!

It's actually as important to me...I did not lease a Tesla because I am on a grand mission to drive an EV (which I completely respect as other's primary reason for going with a Tesla). If I can't get the same iPhone connectivity in my $85K car that I just got in the $16K Hyundai Elantra that I bought for my 16 y.o, daughter (Apple CarPlay), then they won't hold my interest. As was stated above by Festerfet, you can't release the most technologically advanced car on the market and have such a glaring hole in this area. It's completely inexcusable. I honestly think this update is an enormous step backward and I am incredulous how the Tesla engineers could have pushed this out. It flat out sucks.

 

[TexasEV]

Wait. So if we have multiple albums from a single artist on a USB drive, and we select that artist from the media player, it produces a list of all the tracks from all the albums in alphabetical order? Are you kidding me?

There's no way this was even lightly tested by someone who uses a USB drive for music.

I wish I was kidding you. That actually happens. As I said in another thread it seems the 20-something who designed the UI wasn't old enough to have a CD collection, all he's known is streaming music, so he doesn't "get it".

 

[JeffVanEpps]

Anyone else having problems with random play now? Everytime I get in the car random is turned off and I have to turn it back on.

Oh, and half my tracks don't have album art now. Grrrrrr.

Twice the car has forgotten that I had shuffle on. But this morning it remembered. I don't know what the trigger is.

 

[cschock]

After upgrading to 8.0, I've noticed a few changes that actually make the user experience a whole lot worse. Some feel like outright bugs, and others feel like blatant user interaction oversights. So here goes...

• When browsing by "Folders", album tracks are sorted alphabetically by song title. This completely ignores the track number in the metadata, and the file name itself (which, in my case, often has a track number prefix.) However, if you browse to the exact same album via the "Albums" grouping, tracks are correctly sorted.
• They removed the alphabetical jump-list from the right-hand side of the media lists, making it so there's no longer a quick way to skip to a particular letter in the list.
  
• Scrolling large lists of media is now extremely sluggish and painful. You can almost feel the system groaning at you as you do it, and it'll even mistake a scroll gesture for a tap gesture amidst the sluggishness. As such, you'll accidentally open albums during the process.
• When you browse back from an album, it jumps you back to the top of the entire list. Given how painful scrolling that list is, this just makes that experience even worse.

I agree with all of this and let me add a few items:

• When you get in the car it takes quite a long time EVERY TIME to load the USB stick, at least for me. It used to just start the music when I got in the car, now I am blocks away before it begins playback. Annoying.
• Shuffle doesn't seem to be available if you select Songs and then pick a random one to start. Or at least I could not find it.
• I super duper hate the side by side track listings. I can't tell easily which is the order of the tracks, since god forbid they show you track number.
• Very few albums have cover art now. It used to show cover art, often wrong, but something, for almost every album. Now, not so much. And why can't they use this the embedded art in the MP3 files rather than the random location they sporadically use?
• It used to be that when you went back and forth from USB playback to some other source it would (more or less) remember where you were in the list. Now, not so much. Seems to always return you to the extremely unhelpful top level that just has your USB source name. God forbid I want to listen to my music after dropping my daughter off at school now, would take too long to hunt for where I was prior to switching to her Princess Pop 40 station.

My large USB stick with 400+ albums is now more or less unusable in the car. It is a real shame. The player had problems before, but it is much, MUCH worse now for large collections.

 

[DCGOO]

No loss there, considering 99% of the images were random and often hilariously juxtaposed

Depends on the stream. The one I frequent is highly accurate

 

[rammer91]

Hi everybody. We all need to email [email protected] to express this disappointment. I did so today and got a response back saying they will look into it. The more of us that email the higher chance that a quick fix will come out.

 

[dkonigs]

My large USB stick with 400+ albums is now more or less unusable in the car. It is a real shame. The player had problems before, but it is much, MUCH worse now for large collections.

What makes this so painful for me, is that I'm fully capable of actually fixing these problems if I were sat in front of the source code and development environment. I'm a software engineer. I have experience with some of the frameworks they're using. I have a lot of experience working on software that has to perform with an acceptable user experience in the face of limited resources and large amounts of data. I'm also used to having far more end-users of said software than Tesla could ever dream of.

There is *no* good reason you should have to wait for it to rescan the metadata across the whole damn stick every time. In fact, there's really no good reason they couldn't make at least the "Folders" view available within seconds of stick insertion... Just populate the metadata lazily as you scroll through folders, and update whatever feeds the Albums/Artists groupings later when its ready. And run that scanning as a low-priority background task (if you're trying to interact with the UI), so the whole thing doesn't get sluggish as hell.

Of course every time someone complains of the most basic functionality being broken, everyone else seems to jump on-board and add in all their own little long-term feature requests. I just hope that these don't dilute the core issues, and cause Tesla to dismiss all of the issues out of hand. We need to complain about basic functionality loudly, without distraction. Once we actually get them to fix it, then we can ask for more.

 

[komills23]

I just want to echo everything said above. This feels like a major step backwards, especially for those of us who have large USB drives. It is ridiculous that they got rid of the alphabetical index and every time you go backwards, it puts you to the beginning of the list. You can't even scroll backwards from A to Z, but can only get there by going through all the letters, which literally takes forever. it should be easy to search for songs, albums, artists, playlists. I also find the navigation amount radio stations, satellite stations, etc... much more confusing. They should have tested this with consumers before rolling it out. My Prius has a much better media interface than this.

 

[RDoc]

Would a solution to all this be to disable the USB ports?

 

[Merrill]

Can somebody who has 8.0 post a picture of the media screen using a usb showing how it is formatted with artist or album info.