Slacker - love and hate

[PhilBa]

Going on 5 weeks of ownership now. Overall I love the car but slacker is maddening.

It performs really poorly when connectivity is spotty. By spotty, I mean anything less than 4 bars... I've rebooted the console several times to no benefit. I get all sorts of odd behavior:

• stuttering. pausing it for a few seconds sometimes helps it fill up the buffer.
• plays for a few seconds and then skips to next song
• plays most of the way through but skips to the next song prematurely (typically 20-30 seconds left).
• progress indicator advances (slider moves and elapsed time advances) but no sounds come out for a long while. usually about 30 seconds.
• it does this spastic pause/play thing where it plays for a second or two, shows the pause control graphic, a second or two later is shows the play graphic and resumes. This repeats until I push the next button. Next song usually plays fine.

I get at least one of the above problems about every 10 minutes or less.

When it stutters, the left scroll wheel click (for pause) is sometimes ignored. This could be a unrelated to the slacker code but doesn't give me warm-n-fuzzies about the FW quality, overall. It does make me wonder if the stuttering is not related to connectivity at all but rather runaway code somewhere else.

Slacker Radio content is pretty lacking.

• the rotation seems kind of small. Within a given channel, I've heard the same song inside of an hour or two (should be days, at least)
• the radio feature where you seed it with an artist or song and it picks similar songs is pretty bad. I don't know what Carol King and the BeeGees have in common (oh, yeah, she 's a disco queen or something). And why does Steve Miller Band seem to match everyone? The Slacker matching algorithm bites.

Frankly, I'd much prefer Pandora but won't be holding my breath.

 

[HHHH]

This is why I pretty much exclusively use Spotify.

 

[Todd Burch]

And you get this behavior at 2 or 3 bars? I only have Slacker issues with 1 bar or less. I'd have Tesla take a look at your next service.

The ownership team can remotely reset your car--basically set it back to factory settings. You'd lose all of your settings, but it might fix the problem.

 

[PhilBa]

Funny, I posted that 3 hrs ago. Since then, I've gotten email from Tesla saying they are concerned about it. Then email from the Service Center saying they are checking on it with the engineers to determine if they can fix it.

I'll give them an A+ for effort. Hope I hear "Pandora beta test, interested?" but I am definitely not holding my breath. I am very familiar with the innards of streaming media and am pretty sure that it's probably a several bug fixes to slacker. Probably the most beneficial would be to increase the pre-buffer size. I suspect they're decoding garbage which sends slacker off the rails.

 

[Denarius]

I'd prefer spotify over pandora.

 

[Jason S]

All of those things indicate a bad data connection, which is most likely the 3G service provider (*cough* AT&T *cough*) -- don't use the "best quality" option but use the other one instead.

 

[gmtom1]

I just took delivery today, and the slacker app now asks for a user id & password. It doesn't "just work" DS said this is how it's supposed to be, so you can customize your playlists, etc. I don't know what my slacker PW is, so I'll need to figure that out before I can see if I still have the "tesla" features.

Anyone else get this when they picked up their car?

 

[Fredly]

Slacker works great until I get to one bar service.....then I have the same problem.

My problem is the terrible quality of AM service. Might as well not have it.

 

[Jason S]

I just took delivery today, and the slacker app now asks for a user id & password. It doesn't "just work" DS said this is how it's supposed to be, so you can customize your playlists, etc. I don't know what my slacker PW is, so I'll need to figure that out before I can see if I still have the "tesla" features.

Anyone else get this when they picked up their car?

Never heard of that. Cars just came with Slacker and an account for the car from Tesla. Ask the DS again (send an email or w/e).

 

[donv]

Slacker is pathetic, particularly if you listen to classical music. However, TuneIn somewhat makes up for it.

 

[phat78boy]

I haven't had any issues with slacker yet. I've only had my car a week, but it has performed well in that time.

 

[Kraken]

After 6 weeks, I get rare connectivity issues, but overall it has been great. Until yesterday that is.... Got my first slacker commercial, which is unfortunate since it is nice not having any. Then, it just stopped working later in the night. It just says 7:10 of time remaining in any song. Tunedin stopped too. Maybe they are close to ending the tesla paid subscription based on what else is being said in this thread.

 

[stephenpace]

@Kraken: Do your Google Maps update? Having both quit seems like a 3G issue, although I'd reboot the main screen first to see if that helps.

FWIW, I listen to Slacker almost exclusively and rarely have any issue. But I switch stations a lot after the repeats start and AT&T is solid in Houston and I usually have great 3G coverage. I guess when you get the next firmware (the one that EU already has with WiFi) you could try tethering your car to your phone and seeing if that makes any difference.

 

[gmtom1]

Something must be up. I just took delivery of my MS yesterday and from the start it was asking for a user name/password. The DS said I can put in my own acct info to tailor it. Tried w/ no luck - says "Slacker Basic is not supported" Contacted ownership - they advised logging out, then deleting the login info, reboot the screen, then tap the Center T to have the car pull down the login info. Still no go. Waiting to hear back from ownership for the third time....

 

[Kraken]

All problems fixed after resetting the center screen.... Still getting commercials now though.

 

[michael5]

On mine the DS had to flip a button on his end to say it was delivered - and the slacker username/pw was auto populated in. Same goes for the remote access.

 

[islandbayy]

We need I Heart Radio!!!!

 

[Jkam]

This is why I pretty much exclusively use Spotify.

Is there a way to get Spotify to work in the Model S, or will we have to wait for an app sometime in the future?

 

[Tacket]

Spotify works through Bluetooth real well and streams album art. A native app would be wonderful though.

 

[PhilBa]

A follow up of sorts.

I have yet to hear back from Telsa on the issues I posted about. I seriously doubt there is much they can do short of fixing slacker (and thus a FW update). They really shouldn't set customer expectations if they can't follow through.

But I also have a new problem to report. Occasionally, slacker will choke on the next track - I will see a message like "can't load next track" and slacker will just sit there. This can happen at the end of the previous track or when I hit next. Usually after it happens, I can hit next again and a new track correctly starts playing. This morning however, I got trapped in a "can't load" loop. Hitting next simply displayed a can't load next track message. This went on for the 20 minutes I was driving - though I only checked every couple of minutes. I was running late for a meeting so I didn't check to see if I could load a web page. When I got out of the meeting an hour later, slacker was working again. It could be a server issue or some sort of connectivity problem (though not a local problem because I was seeing 4 bars and made a call during this episode). One other symptom was that I went to the top level of slacker (aka the internet tab) and tried a previous search. This simply kicked me back to the top slacker page. That's why I think it might have been some sort of server error.

I rebooted the console after I got home. I have a theory that slacker has some sort of data corruption problem that is causing these errors so rebooting will remove the symptoms for a while.