Slacker Songs restarting - Why?

[wayner]

Tesla seems to be having lots of issues with audio playback on Slacker. With one of the previous software versions the first song that you played when you started your car would terminate after about 45 seconds. For the last few versions whenever you start your car it restarts the song you are playing from the beginning? I have tried pausing the song before getting out of the car but that doesn't seem to work either.

Why does it do that? Why is it so hard to pause at the spot you were at and resume at this spot when you get back in the car?

This is very annoying when you take a lot of short trips in your car.

 

[tomp]

With prior firmware versions, it would pause at the spot you were at and resume there when you got back in. My kids actually like the new version better, as they can hear a favorite song again!

 

[wayner]

But that can be a bit too Groundhog Day. My daily drive is usually about 4-5 minutes from home to the train station. When a long song is playing it keeps restarting unless I manually skip over it. And it makes it worse if I have to stop at a store on the way home. If the full version of In A Gadda Da Vida came on I would never get to hear another song!

 

[Smarty McFly]

I noticed this as well when the 8.0 release came out. Here's my theory:
- When 8.0 was initially released, there was a bug that caused the songs to cut out 45 sec. to a minute before the end of the song if it was the first song being played after turning the car on. It's been well documented on the forums by a number of users.
- Rather than actually fix the root cause, Tesla found a workaround by caching whatever song was playing when the car was turned off and then restarting it when the car was turned back on.

Again, it's just my theory, and I have literally no evidence to back it up other than looking at how the car has been behaving over the various 8.0 updates. I'm sure others will have ideas as well.

 

[wayner]

Yeah - I mentioned that 45 second issue in the OP but it doesn't explain why they can't go back to the code that they used previously, which worked fine. I go my car in Jan 2015 and Slacker played back properly for the first 18 months or so of my car ownership.

 

[KidDoc]

I agree, it is pretty annoying.

 

[David29]

I agree, although sometimes I find that pausing the song does work, if I am out of the car for a short period.

There is a similar behavior with the USB stick. Sometimes you can pause a song, sometimes not. And sometimes I come back to the car and the source has switched from the USB to the radio or to Slacker. This must make it impossible to use the USB to listen to audio books.

 

[Mayhemm]

There is an even worse bug with Slacker; if your signal is weak/slow and the song progress bar catches the buffer bar, it will skip to the next song rather than pausing the current one until it finishes buffering. Really annoying since a) it seems to do it mostly on songs I'm really into and b) my car drops down to 3G or worse much more often after the last update, so this bug occurs much more often as well.

 

[wayner]

So that explains why occasionally I have Slacker skipping to the next song.

 

[Sawyer8888]

Searching the forum looking for answers for Slacker's behavior, I figured I would dust off this old thread.

I just had my '17 MS60 (AP2) picked up for service yesterday and I was given a '16 MS90D, which is a facelifted AP1 model.

Side note: I can hear motor noise much more when accelerating due to the front motors I imagine. Mine is RWD. Cars in the rear view mirror appear to be stretched wider vs. my mirror. AP1 in this car is not as good as I remember AP1 being in previous loaners. Doors on the loaner feel more solid when opening and closing them.​

My AP2 car and this AP1 car have the same Firmware: 2017.42 a88c8d5. Why does the Slacker song start from where I left it in the loaner and the song always starts over in my car? I prefer the pause and play in the loaner as opposed to the replay in mine.

There were some theories that firmware updates forced the restart of Slacker songs.

• Any theories as to why Slacker is currently working two different ways.

• Can I choose whether a song restarts or plays where I left off?

 

[David29]

Fascinating! In my experience in my 2015 70D, the songs always re-start from the beginning, so I am surprised the experience was different in the loaner. This is a longstanding issue reported here repeatedly, I think.
What is even worse is the inconsistent behavior when you listen to podcasts. usually they start over form the beginning after you park and return, but sometimes not! Very awkward for listening to a long podcast when you are running errands or need to exit the car for any reason. One of those issues people have complained of for years and that Tesla seems unable to fix...
Or maybe they have, given your loaner experience!

 

[arcus]

Prior to this update (2017.42) Slacker would restart the song every time I exit and re-enter the car (2017 AP2). Now it resumes where it left off.

Same cannot be said for FLAC or MP3 playback from USB - the track will restart from the beginning.

 

[David29]

Prior to this update (2017.42) Slacker would restart the song every time I exit and re-enter the car (2017 AP2). Now it resumes where it left off.

Same cannot be said for FLAC or MP3 playback from USB - the track will restart from the beginning.

Good! I hope a similar improvement is provided for AP1 cars....and soon.

 

[Sawyer8888]

Prior to this update (2017.42) Slacker would restart the song every time I exit and re-enter the car (2017 AP2). Now it resumes where it left off.

Interesting. I received 17.42 over the weekend however I did not experience a difference. Songs still restart from the beginning.​

Good! I hope a similar improvement is provided for AP1 cars....and soon.

My AP1 loaner has 17.42 and songs begin playing where they left off. Doesn't make sense why there is this inconsistency. While my car is at the SC, I will ask them if they have any input on this - maybe they can punch in the code to toggle the setting, if there is one.​

 

[gearchruncher]

I just got a loaner too. My X with 17.40 has always restarted.

The loaner X resumes on 17.40. I happened to get 17.42 while I had it and it resumes on that too.

I guess I'll harass the service center and see what they say about the disparity too.

 

[verygreen]

They probably won't tell you much. My X resumes. Even when media process crashes (happens a lot!) it tends to resume where it left off (but sometimes it changes input seemingly at random to some other station that I happened to play a week or two ago from a different source (like say I was listening to spotify before leaving the car and then I come back to my car and it switches to tunein or slacker) - this mostly happens pretty rarely).

The loaner I had was restarting from start. I never really dug into it but I suspect you really need a log snapshot from a car that does it and from a car that does not and then compare the logs.

 

[Sawyer8888]

I called Fremont to ask about the Slacker auto-save & play versus the restart. They advised that it had to do with the agreement that they have with Slacker and premium accounts versus the included accounts.

This was also confirmed on a chat with Slacker just now:

It likely is not able to load back to the same place due to the stream as well as the service in the Tesla being Radio Plus and not Premium On Demand.​

 

[verygreen]

This sounds like some BS since clearly there are some cars that can do it and some that cannot. And even those that cannot do it sometimes can do it.

 

[arcus]

Just a thought guys: have you obtained the Slacker account for your Tesla from your DS? Have you logged on to the account to set your preferences? I wonder if this erratic behavior can be contributed to the default setup (where you never logged on by yourself, the car was pre-configured) or where you fiddle around the settings on Slacker (such as bit rate, genre/artist preferences etc.). I did login to the Slacker account provided by Tesla and modified my profile some time ago.

Don't want to spread a FUD, but it doesn't make sense to me that the cars on the same software version would present different results to different users.

 

[gearchruncher]

I called Fremont to ask about the Slacker auto-save & play versus the restart. They advised that it had to do with the agreement that they have with Slacker and premium accounts versus the included accounts.

My service center is looking into this. They say all the cars they have there are restarting, but the loaner I have isn't. They asked if the loaner was logged into someone's account, but it isn't. So it's not a premium account thing. In fact, as far as I can tell, if a Tesla is playing a song, it's cached, and when it re-starts the music, it re-starts the cache. It isn't downloading it again when you hop in the car.

One thing I'm wondering- does PUP have something to do with it, either with auto entry, or something else? My car is non-PUP, the loaner is PUP.