Questions about Slacker, is it supposed to be this buggy?

[psykobunny83]

Hi everyone. I have always used Spotify but when I saw Slacker was included on the free LTE with the Model 3 I thought I'd check into it even though I'd never heard of it before. I remember reading on here or Reddit people saying I think that the Tesla version you get for free is the $3.99 a month version. Is that true? That same post they were saying it's low quality though, that you need Premium for 320kbps which is what I want.

Anyway, the issue I have is I got Premium a week ago. I created playlists on my PC as well as my phone, adding music etc to them all. After a day or so, every few hours the Slacker all on my S9 phone would show no playlists, no music, nothing, it would be like "Create your first playlist!" But my PC would show everything fine. If I logged out of the app on the phone and back in, it would be there for a few hours and then disappear. So I was about to cancel Premium due to this anyway.

I got my M3 today and first thing I did was log into my Premium Slacker account. It had all my playlists as expected, and seemed to work so-so. Searching for music was really weird, like it would take 20-30+ seconds to find results, and half the time if you press a song, it just starts a different one. Like I searched for fun for "Kylie Minogue" and one song was "All the lovers" so I click it, and then it starts playing Can't get you out of my head, which it already had a thumbs up on as well. So any song I play it thumbs up. If I press the heart to add to favourites, it adds it as a station, not the song. I also am unable to rewind the song or when playing a station view all the upcoming tracks.

The car then said there's a software update available, so I told it to do it. Since then, everything is gone in Slacker on the car. There's nothing in my playlists, it's super slow when searching for songs etc. I log out and back in, I cannot get my playlists to load again. I go on my S9, guess what, they are all gone there again, so log out back in they came back, but I cannot get them to come up on the car.

Has anyone else experienced this? It's so frustrating.

 

[Knightshade]

Slacker works differently on different clients.

There's very little to be gained on the Model 3 client from a paid subscription- and no matter what kind of account you have audio quality is 64 kb/second on the Model 3. That's straight from multiple replies from Slacker to people who have inquired about it.

There's several other threads on favorite/playlist functionality in the UI section FWIW

 

[Tdriver]

I upgraded to the mid level for $30/yr, logged in and went to my settings and turned on 320 bits. Great high quality sound on the M3 now with no issues. Have not tried my own playlist but all my favorite stations work well. Love it.

 

[NathanielHrnblwr]

I upgraded to the mid level for $30/yr, logged in and went to my settings and turned on 320 bits. Great high quality sound on the M3 now with no issues. Have not tried my own playlist but all my favorite stations work well. Love it.

How do you know it's 320 on the M3 client? Screenshot? I find the quality lacking and would consider paying (ugh another sub) for decent quality music.

 

[KenF]

I upgraded to the mid level for $30/yr, logged in and went to my settings and turned on 320 bits. Great high quality sound on the M3 now with no issues. Have not tried my own playlist but all my favorite stations work well. Love it.

You might log back in and check your Slacker account settings after a day or two. In the past, others reported that the Slacker site automatically resets Tesla users to 64 kbps. It is not clear to me whether changing the site to 320 kbps (in a Tesla) does anything,

 

[Knightshade]

I upgraded to the mid level for $30/yr, logged in and went to my settings and turned on 320 bits. Great high quality sound on the M3 now with no issues. Have not tried my own playlist but all my favorite stations work well. Love it.

The placebo effect is pretty cool huh?

You're still listening at 64kb in your car. Any improvement in quality exists only in your imagination.

Slackers FAQ explains that bitrate is per-client/platform- setting it one way on the website doesn't change the quality anywhere else.

Quality setting is done on a per-platform basis. If you listen to Slacker Radio on multiple platforms, changing the quality setting on one device will have no effect on the quality settings of other devices

Tesla has explicitly not included the ability to change the bitrate in the Model 3 to anything higher than 64

(they DID let you change it to 128kb in the S for a while, if you had the better stereo option in the car, though last I heard they removed that too)

 

[rdlink]

G*DD*MM*T TESLA! Just give us CarPlay, for the love of Pete! You can keep your streaming bandwidth. I'll use my phone.

 

[psykobunny83]

The main problem I'm having with it is that it just doesn't work. It did fine when I first got the car, all my playlists were there and I could search for any song and play it on demand no problem . then it did a software update and since then it has never worked, playlist are always empty and whenever I search for a song on demand it will find it but when you tap it it plays a completely different song. for a while when it was playing the proper song I could tap the heart and it would add it to my favorites on the car and it would show it as a song Under favorites. Now it changed so when you go under favorites it shows each one as a radio station for that song but when you tap it it just plays completely different songs I cannot get it to play the specific song I want. I restarted the touchscreen last night and then it worked for a little while but it's back and forth .

Then when I log into the app on my phone my playlists are always gone from it as well unless I log out and back in. Then the car starts saying my account is in use somewhere else, never seen anything so complicated .

All I want is a way to play specific songs from my library, like add tracks to playlist and then listen to those playlists in the car. it's disappointing that plugging your phone in or using Bluetooth doesn't let you browse your library on the touch screen . Even my eight-year-old BMW lets me browse Spotify on the cars screen without even opening or touching my phone including showing album art .

 

[ewoodrick]

Searching for music was really weird, like it would take 20-30+ seconds to find results, and half the time if you press a song, it just starts a different one. Like I searched for fun for "Kylie Minogue" and one song was "All the lovers" so I click it, and then it starts playing Can't get you out of my head, which it already had a thumbs up on as well. So any song I play it thumbs up. If I press the heart to add to favourites, it adds it as a station, not the song. I also am unable to rewind the song or when playing a station view all the upcoming tracks.

For the Model 3, the heart is the switch to keep it as a favorite station, works on FM as well. Slacker is a streaming service, not a music service. It's the difference between a FM radio station and collection of albums. Slacker may give you a specific song, but it has limits to how often it can play that song, like making a request at a radio station. Why? That's the way the licensing folks figured out how to do it.

 

[psykobunny83]

For the Model 3, the heart is the switch to keep it as a favorite station, works on FM as well. Slacker is a streaming service, not a music service. It's the difference between a FM radio station and collection of albums. Slacker may give you a specific song, but it has limits to how often it can play that song, like making a request at a radio station. Why? That's the way the licensing folks figured out how to do it.

Not sure what you mean by slacker isn't a streaming music service. I'm not talking about the free version included in the car we are talking about slacker premium here which functions literally the exact same as Spotify or Google play music. I can open Slacker on my phone or computer right now search for a song like despacito for example and play it on repeat all day if I wanted. In the car I search for it, it finds it but when you tap it to play it it plays something else like Pitbull move to Miami.

Like I said in a previous post when I would use the heart before it would save that specific song to my favorite not a radio station. After this software update on the car last night none of that works and the heart just saves everything as a music station and my whole account acts like it's the free version.

Of maybe 50 songs in the car I have searched for to play, maybe three of them have actually properly played everything else plays something else or it plays some weird remix of the song I searched for. I'm going to cancel my slacker premium account and just use Android auto on my phone with Bluetooth and Google Play instead as this slacker service is horrible .

 

[Knightshade]

I'm going to cancel my slacker premium account and just use Android auto on my phone with Bluetooth and Google Play instead as this slacker service is horrible .

The service works perfectly on other devices- as you yourself have mentioned.

So the problem isn't slackers service- it's Teslas software. It does not support all the same features other slacker clients do.

 

[psykobunny83]

The service works perfectly on other devices- as you yourself have mentioned.

So the problem isn't slackers service- it's Teslas software. It does not support all the same features other slacker clients do.

Literally my first post on here says it doesn't work on my Android phone either, the playlists all disappear after a few hours until you log out of Slacker and back into it. My post also said it worked perfect until the latest software update broke it. Not sure if people are just skimming to the latest post here or what but this was all in the OP.

I have an appointment with Tesla Service for them to look into it since like I said it was working fine when I took delivery, then this software update broke it. It honestly sounds like half the people responding on here have never even used Slacker Premium before, so I'm just going to deal with Service instead and see what they say at my appt later today.

 

[Knightshade]

Literally my first post on here says it doesn't work on my Android phone either,

and literally your first post also says "my PC would show everything fine."

Hence why I pointed that out in the post you're replying to.

GL at the service center though- as I said there's a slew of threads about the various shortcomings of the slacker client on the model 3 (and other Teslas) so I don't expect they're going to be able to "fix" this for you.

 

[rdlink]

...So the problem isn't slackers service- it's Teslas software...

Truer words were never typed.

CarPlay and Android Auto. Now, please.