Music skipping with UHFS with USB, flac

[hiroshiy]

Thx. I listen to lots of Pop, Vocals, Country, Soundtracks, and Broadway for the most part -- only some Rock and little Classical.

FWIW, I normally keep Nav on the top half of my CID with Media Player on the bottom. The last few months, I have only occasional USB skipping, and it's happened with SanDisk, Patriot and Kingston USB sticks -- can't say there is any difference in skipping across the name brands I'm using. I also don't seem to notice a difference if I'm using Nav to a Destination or just letting it display my location. ...and others will disagree with me I'm sure, but I seem to have a lot less skipping as I've taken the time to limit the number of bookmarks I have in MS Browser, keeping Nav history to a minimum, keeping less than 6,000 tracks on my USB stick (all under a single folder), and I stopped using the Google hybrid Nav display, which I suspect takes at least more computing cycles to download and display than the line version of the maps, if not also more memory. Despite others belief, I truly believe having too many tracks on my USB stick, combined with a too complex folder structure on the USB stick, takes more memory that has to come from some limited amount the CID has, and that is likely shared with Nav History, and Browser Bookmarks, so to the degree I decrease what I can that potentially uses memory, I seem to have less problems.

I still think Tesla has problems with their memory management, not prioritizing audio as high as it should be to avoid the skipping we occasionally encounter, and perhaps the CID Processor is becoming overly taxed with all that it's being expected to do (like extensive logging back to the mothership). I don't use Autopilot enough to notice if there may be an additional correlation when I have it on, of USB skipping is more or not...

Anyway, try reducing what you can that may tax memory, and see if you get a little better result as I seem to. I hate having to try to deal with all this in my otherwise great car, but until Tesla does something to improve it for us, "we've got what we got" (pardon the bad English!). My best.

Hi, Bert, thanks for your tips. I counted my library and it had just over 2500 times. So next I will clear my nav history. I only have several browser bookmarks.

BTW I purchased MediaMonkey Gold to check and edit tags on my library. I found that to my surprise most of files are (almost) correctly tagged, but still on my car using Albums tab, I still can't get all tunes in the album there. By Folder works fine with no album art. On my USB I have each artist folder in the root directory. Should I create a music directory first and put all artist folders in there?

 

[thecloud]

BTW I purchased MediaMonkey Gold to check and edit tags on my library. I found that to my surprise most of files are (almost) correctly tagged, but still on my car using Albums tab, I still can't get all tunes in the album there. By Folder works fine with no album art. On my USB I have each artist folder in the root directory. Should I create a music directory first and put all artist folders in there?

In another thread, someone made this discovery: you can have non-ASCII characters in a file's tags, but not in the name of the file or folder. For example, I had the string "Dvořák - Symphony No. 9" in the Album tag and also in the folder name. Those tracks did not show up in any view except By Folder, until I changed the name of the folder to "Dvorak - Symphony No. 9" (without any special diacritical characters). Then the tracks were found in all views, and the tags (which I didn't change) were all rendered correctly.

It could be that your files or folders are also named with special characters (where "special" means non-ASCII, e.g. hiragana), and renaming them may work around the problem.

What I've done, based on what I've read from BertL and others plus my own experimentation: I have a top-level folder on the USB stick named Music-001, and inside that folder are a number of folders named for individual artists (plus a Compilations folder.) Inside those artist folders are album folders, and inside the album folders are the music files. This hierarchy is never more than 3 levels deep. When I add or remove an album, I rename the top-level folder as if it were a version number... e.g. I'll change Music-001 to Music-002. This seems to force the car to forget whatever directory structure it had previously cached when I replace the USB stick, and since I've started doing this, I haven't noticed any skipping problems. (Yes, there's the odd dropped beat, but you really have to be paying attention to hear that.)

 

[hiroshiy]

In another thread, someone made this discovery: you can have non-ASCII characters in a file's tags, but not in the name of the file or folder. For example, I had the string "Dvořák - Symphony No. 9" in the Album tag and also in the folder name. Those tracks did not show up in any view except By Folder, until I changed the name of the folder to "Dvorak - Symphony No. 9" (without any special diacritical characters). Then the tracks were found in all views, and the tags (which I didn't change) were all rendered correctly.

It could be that your files or folders are also named with special characters (where "special" means non-ASCII, e.g. hiragana), and renaming them may work around the problem.

What I've done, based on what I've read from BertL and others plus my own experimentation: I have a top-level folder on the USB stick named Music-001, and inside that folder are a number of folders named for individual artists (plus a Compilations folder.) Inside those artist folders are album folders, and inside the album folders are the music files. This hierarchy is never more than 3 levels deep. When I add or remove an album, I rename the top-level folder as if it were a version number... e.g. I'll change Music-001 to Music-002. This seems to force the car to forget whatever directory structure it had previously cached when I replace the USB stick, and since I've started doing this, I haven't noticed any skipping problems. (Yes, there's the odd dropped beat, but you really have to be paying attention to hear that.)

Thanks, thecloud! It seems this international character bug affects in my case. In some albums I can only see half of the tunes.

Will try to create one top directory and put all artist folders in there, instead of putting all artist folders in the root directory.

 

[BertL]

@hiroshiy: Yes, as @thecloud suggests, special characters (from a US perspective) in folder names can cause problems with Media Player. I've not done complete testing (I'll leave that to Tesla Engineers to do some day ), but the problem seems inconsistent with if it does or does not cause issues when the same characters are used in Artist and Title tags, but I'd certainly try to also avoid them in the filename of your tracks for best compatibility with Media Player's idiosyncrasies.

Renaming the top-level folder is quick and will help if you change certain tag data on your tracks. Media Player tries to speed up subsequent scanning if the same USB stick is re-inserted, by checking if the folder/track names are the same as what it found there before (even if file date or size has changed), it skips reading the actual tag data in those tracks. I appreciate what the designers tried to do, but unfortunately the logic they have used is flawed given how music tag data can change and is imbedded with the music in each file.

I don't believe you'll ever see Gracenotes album art when accessing via Folders -- I never once have. I believe it's either a bug or Tesla's design to not display folder art when playing music via that tab, opposed to all the other tabs where it does appear -- as odd as the Gracenotes art is so much of the time. As I suspect most people know by now, Tesla's Media Player never shows imbedded album art within your tracks if it has it, despite that not requiring any internet resources and would be far more accurate than Gracenotes when a track contains the image.

 

[hiroshiy]

Surprisingly, as @BertL suggested, after I removed all of my nav history of about one year and 9 months, the skipping seems to have disappeared! What a magic. I don't understand how the music playback and the number of nav history are related, but maybe the system uses more memory to keep a few hundreds of past nav history. It also took me a long time to delete all nav history - I had to delete one by one.

So anybody having issues with music skipping - please try deleting nav history. I'm still testing it and I have 7 days of no skipping. Great!

 

[BertL]

Surprisingly, as @BertL suggested, after I removed all of my nav history of about one year and 9 months, the skipping seems to have disappeared! What a magic. I don't understand how the music playback and the number of nav history are related, but maybe the system uses more memory to keep a few hundreds of past nav history. It also took me a long time to delete all nav history - I had to delete one by one.

So anybody having issues with music skipping - please try deleting nav history. I'm still testing it and I have 7 days of no skipping. Great!

Glad to hear the situation is better for you!!!

 

[Terra117]

My UHFS system suffered from the skipping/dropout issue with FLAC and high bitrate MP3 files on a daily basis.

Just anecdotal at this point, but 2 weeks ago I turned of Dolby and it hasn't skipped once.

 

[hiroshiy]

In my case Dolby was always off.

Recently, with minimal number of nav histories, I rarely experience skipping. However it's not went away completely.