Spotify w/ V10 update

[Fernand]

Solved my own question.
if you search for a song and select "song" at the top of the results page, then select the song to play, it will play the song in Spotify. If you let the song play through, at the end it will start playing another related/similar song. Once that happens, it automatically generates a "radio" based on the searches song, and places it in the "stations" tab.

enjoy.

[grumble] Just the thing to do while e.g merging Eastbound 80 to 880 and 580 to 24.

 

[garth_angst]

Agreed, this is by no means definitive. But I tried. This is as much as this guy knew.

But... how is someone going to capture network traffic going over Tesla's cellular network to the onboard Spotify app?

And the guy knew nothing. He never said anything about the Tesla. I would bet that he didn't even know Tesla has a built-in app to stream directly form the car and not your phone. He had no idea what you were talking about.

 

[eXntrc]

We use Spotify family (6 members) across several devices. I've been playing with Spotify in the car trying to understand why it's felt so unstable and I think may have found the answer. I believe that most of the problems I've been experiencing are because Tesla didn't implement Spotify device hand-off properly.

The most common problem I see is an infinite loading screen:

It seemed to randomly happen in the Playlist screen as wall as the Song screen. I say seemingly random because I found the pattern. Turns out the Tesla only gets stuck when I've been running Spotify on my Android phone. If I completely close the Spotify app on my phone, the loading issues go away.

The next issue is with sending music from the phone to the car as the playback device. Even though the song plays, sometimes it doesn't show that there's even a next track. The phone sees it, but the car does not.

Finally, I've had times when even though I select the car as the active playback device:

the car does a little refresh spin and then tells me music is still playing on another device.

IMO, device hand-off is not implemented correctly. The car is not taking active status away from another device when the user performs an action that should make it active (for example, browsing or selecting a track which leads to the infinite loading issue.) The car is also not receiving active status when another device tries to push active to it (switching device to the car from the phone).

I'd like to know if anyone else can confirm these things. And if so, maybe we can open up some bug reports.

 

[malou]

Switching playback from phone to the car with the iOS app this morning did not worked properly.

 

[Fernand]

Get an Echo Auto. That works great for me.

How do you use that?

 

[Fernand]

On the status and handoff, I'm not sure it's a Spotify issue. I was playing HypeMachine (which BTW is a great way to hear new and sometimes experimental music) on my Android with the Car in "Phone" playback, i.e. through Bluetooth. It works, and you can even go forward and backwards in the HypeMachine list. It used to display the track name BUT today the car never displayed titles or track length correctly, it thinks it's still playing a track that was played sometime before, status is not updating even remotely OK. .

 

[voip-ninja]

1. I've been listening to Spotify at work today and notice that when I play a song, etc., and the player goes into "radio mode" it gives both a "love" and a "block" icon so that a song can be added to liked songs or blocked from playback.... why doesn't the Tesla app do this?

2. I played Spotify from the car last night when it was on WiFi but I only showed about 20kbps of data usage on the car through my Unify monitoring app.. I'm wondering if the car plays Spotify from the LTE radio even when WiFi is available. So I don't know what the audio bit rate actually is.

 

[dmurphy]

How do you use that?

I plug it in, it connects via Bluetooth to my phone, and then I can give it commands like, "Alexa, play some Billy Joel from Apple Music" -- and it uses my phone's bluetooth to play to the car.

"Alexa, play 90's on 9 on Sirius XM" - and it uses my phone's LTE connection to start streaming.
"Alexa, play some classical music" - and it plays some classical music from whatever source I set up in the Alexa app on my phone. (I use Apple Music, but plenty of others are supported - Apple, Sirius XM, iHeartRadio, Amazon Music, Spotify, Pandora, Tidal, etc.)

It's pretty great.... I'm quite happy with it.

 

[eXntrc]

on my Android with the Car in "Phone" playback, i.e. through Bluetooth. It works, and you can even go forward and backwards in the HypeMachine list

Perhaps. But I've never had issues being able to go forward and backward on Spotify over bluetooth playing on my phone. Also, after my screen shots where I could go forward on the phone but not the car, I switched to the exact same playlist on the car and was able to go both forward and backward just fine.

 

[malou]

After a day of testing (got the update last night), device hand-off seams weird indeed. When I got in the car twice today, the car was showing "no connection", as if the car was still sleeping when I got in, which prevented Spotify to kick in and continue what was paused on the phone. Then when getting out of the car, since it doesn't have an "off" switch, pressing play on the phone started playback in the car which was still the active player, even 10 mins after getting out of the car. So yeah, not perfect.

Overall, the current Spotify integration is better than nothing. I really like the playback UI and choosing songs on the go, on the screen. It's not perfect, but it could get better with a future update

 

[Eno Deb]

2. I played Spotify from the car last night when it was on WiFi but I only showed about 20kbps of data usage on the car through my Unify monitoring app.. I'm wondering if the car plays Spotify from the LTE radio even when WiFi is available. So I don't know what the audio bit rate actually is.

Most likely the client downloads and buffers segments of the songs in bursts, i.e. it's not like it has a constant bitrate, so instantaneous measurements over a short time window can be misleading. To measure the bitrate accurately you'd probably have to capture the packets for a complete song and then use a tool like Wireshark to analyse the flow and measure the total amount of downlink data.

Edit: I did just that. Turned on packet capture for the car's IP address in my Pfsense router, and played a song that was the last one in a playlist (to make sure playback stopped and it doesn't start fetching data for another song). I then loaded the capture into Wireshark. It uses HTTP for downloading (probably something like HLS) and the data comes from Akamai servers. The song was 5:15. The total amount of data downloaded was 3866k, which gets us to about 98 kbit/s average. Taking protocol overhead into account, it's safe to say that the Tesla client streams at Spotify's 96 kbit/s rate.

 

[voip-ninja]

Most likely the client downloads and buffers segments of the songs in bursts, i.e. it's not like it has a constant bitrate, so instantaneous measurements over a short time window can be misleading. To measure the bitrate accurately you'd probably have to capture the packets for a complete song and then use a tool like Wireshark to analyse the flow and measure the total amount of downlink data.

Edit: I did just that. Turned on packet capture for the car's IP address in my Pfsense router, and played a song that was the last one in a playlist (to make sure playback stopped and it doesn't start fetching data for another song). I then loaded the capture into Wireshark. It uses HTTP for downloading (probably something like HLS) and the data comes from Akamai servers. The song was 5:15. The total amount of data downloaded was 3866k, which gets us to about 98 kbit/s average. Taking protocol overhead into account, it's safe to say that the Tesla client streams at Spotify's 96 kbit/s rate.

Yeah I’ve been listening and there’s no way it is 320kbps or whatever the premium is supposed to allow.

it might be higher bitrate than Slacker but they sound pretty close as in compressed.
If I stream a high bitrate AAC or even 256kbps MP3 copy of same song from my phone over BT it sounds noticeably clearer than this stuff.

 

[EVinAZ]

Spotify on the M3 has been a disaster for me. My laptop and iPhone sync perfectly, but nothing syncs to the Tesla. So I added some stuff while in the car. Today I added two albums and hit the save button. Went to lunch, came back to the car and the 2 albums were gone. I'm a new Spotify subscriber, so many I don't know how to use it, but it works fine on my other devices. A conversation with Spotify was less than useless. Won't renew at 90 days at this rate.

 

[DopeGhoti]

FLAC from USB sounds much better than Spotify, but Spotify still sounds much better than Slacker did.

 

[Eno Deb]

it might be higher bitrate than Slacker but they sound pretty close as in compressed.
If I stream a high bitrate AAC or even 256kbps MP3 copy of same song from my phone over BT it sounds noticeably clearer than this stuff.

You have to be careful when comparing streams or files from different sources, since there are many factors other than the compression that can play tricks on the perception (such as loudness differences). Audiophiles may not be happy, but I think 96kbps with a codec as efficient as Vorbis or AAC is perfectly fine for a noisy environment with less than perfect acoustic characteristics such as a car.

 

[Piwacet]

Most likely the client downloads and buffers segments of the songs in bursts, i.e. it's not like it has a constant bitrate, so instantaneous measurements over a short time window can be misleading. To measure the bitrate accurately you'd probably have to capture the packets for a complete song and then use a tool like Wireshark to analyse the flow and measure the total amount of downlink data.

Edit: I did just that. Turned on packet capture for the car's IP address in my Pfsense router, and played a song that was the last one in a playlist (to make sure playback stopped and it doesn't start fetching data for another song). I then loaded the capture into Wireshark. It uses HTTP for downloading (probably something like HLS) and the data comes from Akamai servers. The song was 5:15. The total amount of data downloaded was 3866k, which gets us to about 98 kbit/s average. Taking protocol overhead into account, it's safe to say that the Tesla client streams at Spotify's 96 kbit/s rate.

I was wondering if this analysis took data compression into account. Does spotify use ogg? Thanks for the analysis!

 

[Eno Deb]

I was wondering if this analysis took data compression into account. Does spotify use ogg? Thanks for the analysis!

Yes, that's the compressed data rate. AFAIK Spotify uses Vorbis for client-based playback and AAC for the web player.

 

[pdx_m3s]

Fingers crossed they are developing native Apple Music support. I switched from Spotify years ago.

 

[crackers8199]

We use Spotify family (6 members) across several devices. I've been playing with Spotify in the car trying to understand why it's felt so unstable and I think may have found the answer. I believe that most of the problems I've been experiencing are because Tesla didn't implement Spotify device hand-off properly.

The most common problem I see is an infinite loading screen:

View attachment 462193

It seemed to randomly happen in the Playlist screen as wall as the Song screen. I say seemingly random because I found the pattern. Turns out the Tesla only gets stuck when I've been running Spotify on my Android phone. If I completely close the Spotify app on my phone, the loading issues go away.

The next issue is with sending music from the phone to the car as the playback device. Even though the song plays, sometimes it doesn't show that there's even a next track. The phone sees it, but the car does not.

View attachment 462194

View attachment 462195

Finally, I've had times when even though I select the car as the active playback device:

View attachment 462196

the car does a little refresh spin and then tells me music is still playing on another device.

View attachment 462197

IMO, device hand-off is not implemented correctly. The car is not taking active status away from another device when the user performs an action that should make it active (for example, browsing or selecting a track which leads to the infinite loading issue.) The car is also not receiving active status when another device tries to push active to it (switching device to the car from the phone).

I'd like to know if anyone else can confirm these things. And if so, maybe we can open up some bug reports.

this would explain what i saw tonight when trying to switch back and forth between the car's spotify interface and echo auto.

PSA: spotify and echo auto don't play nice together

 

[crackers8199]

has anyone else noticed there are some songs that won't play via the car's spotify interface that play just fine otherwise, whether via the app or via alexa / echo auto?