Spotify HiFi / Apple Music / USB / Best Quality?

[shaunokeefe]

Hi All,

I’ve seen a few threads that mention the quality of the integrated Spotify is not what it could be.

Does anyone have any advice or tips on what would be best way to listen to high quality music to get the most out of what seems a decent audio system?

Seems my options are USB SSD with high quality music on, running Spotify on my iPhone over Bluetooth or anything else ?

Cheers
Shaun

 

[hellchris]

I use TeslaUSB, which runs on a Raspberry Pi. It emulates a USB drive, but can also be configured to automatically pull music from a shared drive on your network. It also automatically uploads saved TeslaCam footage.

 

[Knightshade]

FLAC or WAV from USB storage (key, SDcard, SSD, doesn't matter at all, all of them are way faster than needed for music, SSD eats the most power though)

Anything else will be massively lower quality.

 

[sduck]

Flacs (or other lossless types) on a usb drive are your best option. SSD running ext4 for best performance remembering position over power cycles.

 

[Twiglett]

Hi All,

I’ve seen a few threads that mention the quality of the integrated Spotify is not what it could be.

Does anyone have any advice or tips on what would be best way to listen to high quality music to get the most out of what seems a decent audio system?

Seems my options are USB SSD with high quality music on, running Spotify on my iPhone over Bluetooth or anything else ?

Cheers
Shaun

As others have suggested, you will get better quality from music files on a USB drive - assuming you can live with the fun of maintaining it.
To extend that however, I would try the different file formats first to see which one you can live with.
FLAC is lossless so should be "best" - but if you can live with CBR320 mp3's you can fit way more music on that USB.
Just go with the format that suits your ears, remembering that the car makes more noise when moving

 

[chisss]

I know on my iphone app you can select the quality which worked great when I had a car with Carplay... *cough*...
however with the Tesla, it doesn't seem to have options for quality, seems that it plays at 96kbps? that's crazy for a car that is "the future" that it can't allow streaming at higher quality for an app that is built in...

 

[frankusb]

As others have suggested, you will get better quality from music files on a USB drive - assuming you can live with the fun of maintaining it.

If you have a m3u playlist, I have a python script that will remove/add as appropriate. I manage my playlist in Plex, export an m3u then sync the USB drive.

 

[Aphelion]

FLAC is the only option, anything else honestly sounds rubbish in a Tesla. The Bluetooth audio codec is poor and mangles audio, the inbuilt apps are limited. It seems odd to put so much effort in to the sound system and then cripple it. Not even USB-C audio pass-through which would fix all this.

So it's back to MediaMonkey and FLAC file management for me, and hoping that playlist support and controls are somewhat usable. This is like going back 20 years to get decent sound quality.

 

[CapinWinky]

This thread is insane. FLAC? Talk about overkill.

It's true, the in-car Spotify/Tune-In are limited to 96kbps and many songs have volume and balancing issues making things worse. You don't have to immediately reach for a bazooka of 36,864 kbps FLAC, and maybe try the 1Mbps or 2Mbps of BT 4.2 or 5.0 (depending on what your car has) instead.

Personally, I noticed the really bad balancing of Spotify before the bitrate issues and I now normally just stream YTmusic from my phone, which sounds great.

 

[Aphelion]

Um FLAC is only around 1MBit/s, maybe 1.4MBit/s uncompressed, maybe double that for high definition Master quality audio.

Files are the order of 30-50MB per standard track, or 5-10MB/minute.

Bandwidth and storage for FLAC stopped being an issue decades ago, it's hardly excessive.

The issue is not so much quality but pass-through.

All lossless pipes do is pass audio through untouched. As modern systems can have many pipes, each touch or lossy transcode over say SD Bluetooth, mangles it a tiny bit which adds up to hideousness at the other end.

The in car Bluetooth is limited to low quality codecs, even though lossless LDAC works perfectly fine over it (if supported).

That's all, it's just about getting audio through untouched. And because even super HD audio is such low bitrate compared to everything else today it shouldn't be an issue on modern systems.

 

[rjpjnk]

I agree. I have learned to live with BT streaming from my phone, but it is baffling to me as well how a modern car can have no means of direct input for streaming high resolution audio. Like mentioned previously, why make such a high quality sound system and then gimp the input? Just doesn’t make sense.

 

[kael13]

What BT codecs are supported? Anyone know?

 

[rjpjnk]

As far as I am aware, Tesla BT supports SBC and AAC at all possible bitrates as evidenced by the test data shown in this post.
AAC 256kbps is a great option so I am happy it is supported. Certainly a whole lot better than built in Tesla celular Spotify at 96kbps.

Of course that was three years ago. Things may have changed since then.

Bluetooth Audio Codecs

I was curious what audio codecs are supported on the Model 3 for Bluetooth media streaming since the quality actually seemed pretty good. I thought I'd share my findings for folks who are also interested. From past threads, it looks like the support is the same as the Model S and X. I logged...

teslamotorsclub.com

 

[eagle_eye]

I use TeslaUSB, which runs on a Raspberry Pi. It emulates a USB drive, but can also be configured to automatically pull music from a shared drive on your network. It also automatically uploads saved TeslaCam footage.

When you format your sentry drive using the format button on the tesla does it also wipe your music drive ? debating on going with TeslaUSB, i have a 500gb external SSD now for dash and sentry. The wifi sync of a teslausb would be awesome to add music to the car to match my home desktop. Could even download music onto my phone and set that up to sync with the teslausb using hotspot.