Slacker Radio (US) Streaming - 320 Kbps Bitrate Support
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Wow I started this thread and just came back to 5 pages of replies and this wonderful news. Just toggled this on the website and can confirm the same results. The car is now requesting the 320 Kbps audio and it sounds much better. Woohoo.
Everyone should keep in mind that this will increase the chance of the stream rebuffering during playback. This is a reason to want the an LTE upgrade, but not a reason to complain about the 320 Kbps streams. The last thing we want is for Tesla to go and disable this.
This sounds great. But can someone please post the exact steps to be followed to enable a Model S to stream 320 kbs Slacker? Instructions like get credentials from Tesla, go to Slacker's site and set streaming to 320 are great if you know what you are doing. But for those of us who are somewhat challenged in working with Slacker's website a bit more help would be appreciated. I was just on Slacker's site and would not know where to begin. Thanks.
Xenoilphobe
Active Member
Thank you for contacting Tesla Motors Technical Support. For Slacker Radio, your account credentials can be accessed/changed from inside the vehicle on the touchscreen. Press “Controls” in the bottom left corner, then “Settings” at the top, then “Apps” on the left side, then “Media”. You should be able to modify the Slacker credentials there if you’ve created your own Slacker account.
Hopefully this helps, but feel free to let us know if you have any other questions or if that did not properly address the question.
Hopefully this helps, but feel free to let us know if you have any other questions or if that did not properly address the question.
Email servicehelpna at teslamotors.com , ask them for the slacker credentials. Login to the slacker website, click on the account name in the upper right hand corner and select account settings. From there select general settings, and enabled the maximum audio quality by clicking on the on off button.
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This happened when asking just for the credentials?
I have done all of the above steps and I am not convinced that the car is receiving 320kbps. I think the sound is a bit better but to me it doesn't seem like the buffering takes any longer and I would think that it should take 2.5X as long now.
I have an LTE wifi hotspot that measures how much data you use. I will try using this rather than the 3G radio to see how much data I use in a typical drive to work while using Slacker to see if that gives some idea.
I have an LTE wifi hotspot that measures how much data you use. I will try using this rather than the 3G radio to see how much data I use in a typical drive to work while using Slacker to see if that gives some idea.
travwill
Active Member
Yeah, I think they seem to be steering away from giving out the Tesla credentials now it seems or it depends on who gets your request and their knowledge, training, or day they've had ;-) I could see Tesla saying if you want to change credentials for any reasons, increased bandwidth, etc that you should use your own Slacker account.
Slacker Premium cost $10 a month in reality, not horrible. It lets you manage favs, stations, and while they all let you change to 320, only Premium upgraded Slacker really seems to send 320 to you when available.
Well that's interesting, maybe more clearly state you want to modify the settings such as explicit content, steaming quality, espn cut in etc which cannot be done in the car.
I made the switch yesterday. Songs take at least double the time to download and it sounds a little better, hard to say exactly how much better as I'm not an audiophile. I only asked Tesla for the password, I gave them the Slacker email address when I asked them, maybe that helped.
How does changing the setting to 320 on the car web browser affect the setting in the Tesla app for Slacker? You can log onto your Slacker account from any computer and make the 320 change, but that needs to be done on each device. Setting your preference to 320 does not affect all of your devices. So, if you change the Slacker setting to 320 on your Tesla web browser, it seems that will set your download speed for the browser only (which does not have audio capability). Thoughts...
It appears that the setting does infact change the quality for the tesla player. I cannot speak to your other devices. Try it and see what you find out.
I ran a test tonight. I used my LTE hotspot instead of 3G for my car. The hotspot shows how much data you have used in pretty much real time.
On my 39 minute ride home tonight I used 42MB of data. It appeared that Slacker songs were taking about 1MB per minute. You could see this as when a 4 minute song downloaded the data counter went up by 4 MB. A bitrate of 128kbps equates to 0.96MB/minute. Conclusion- the streaming was at 128kbps.
And yes, I did change my quality setting on the Tesla and on the Slacker web UI. I had logged into Slacker from my work PC and set it to Maximum quality but perhaps that also has to be done on each client. I logged into Slacker from my iPad and it was NOT set to max quality. Perhaps we need an upgrade to the Tesla app to properly support the higher quality.
On my 39 minute ride home tonight I used 42MB of data. It appeared that Slacker songs were taking about 1MB per minute. You could see this as when a 4 minute song downloaded the data counter went up by 4 MB. A bitrate of 128kbps equates to 0.96MB/minute. Conclusion- the streaming was at 128kbps.
And yes, I did change my quality setting on the Tesla and on the Slacker web UI. I had logged into Slacker from my work PC and set it to Maximum quality but perhaps that also has to be done on each client. I logged into Slacker from my iPad and it was NOT set to max quality. Perhaps we need an upgrade to the Tesla app to properly support the higher quality.
Muzzman1
Member
@Majerus
Did you have a chance to do that packet capture? I'm dying to know if the quality increase is just the placebo affect. Thanks!
Did you have a chance to do that packet capture? I'm dying to know if the quality increase is just the placebo affect. Thanks!
Yep I did last night, What I found was interesting but have sent an email to slacker to confirm. Once I get an update from them ill post the info.
I just sent an email to servicehelpna at teslamotors.com. Simply said, "Is it possible to get the credentials for my Slacker account? Thank you." They responded with the credentials in three minutes.
Try that with ANY other auto maker! Love this car/company!
Try that with ANY other auto maker! Love this car/company!
Cyclone
Cyclonic Member ((.oO))
Hopefully, even if you packet trace shows we are not getting 320 Kbps in our cars, we are getting an improvement. I would hate to think it's a placebo effect when I hear the same two days in a row with the same settings in the car and I can clearly hear and see a difference.
