goRt
Active Member
The post I quoted had Jag drivers paying £50 - that's crazy.
At home I have the three £20 unlimited data (£65 cash back) which provides all I need ~£14 a month.
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Tesla Spotify Account
- Thread starter dst87
- Start date
The post I quoted had Jag drivers paying £50 - that's crazy.
At home I have the three £20 unlimited data (£65 cash back) which provides all I need ~£14 a month.
RjbT3
Member
I don't think it is possible to access the credentials of the car's Spotify account either. I'm sure I've gleaned that from a podcast or YouTube video of someone discussing this. They were saying that the car's account has restricted playlist functionality but you can log-in with your own Premium Subscription to access your own library.
I'm an Apple Music user too because I prefer it to Spotify (who share all their user's listening data with Facebook). But as Spotify is the only option for the M3 native system I've just opted for a Vodafone Red Entertainment pack. I got it for £20 for 20GB per month which includes a "free" Premium Spotify subscription. So, now I am in a similar situation to you guys trying to find a way to sync my Apple Playlists with Spotify. I tried this a good few years back and couldn't figure out how (I tried some awful/cumbersome third-party solutions). Do you know of a relatively painless method?
This is correct. The restricted playlist functionality (when using the default Tesla account) is still pretty good. It allows you to save any searchable playlists, artists, albums and songs. Also has genre based playlists and daily featured playlists etc. But there is no facility to build your own personal custom playlists. The upside is that I tend to listen to a broader range of music in the car, rather than endlessly churning through my own custom playlists. Overall I much prefer Tesla Spotify it to any other form of in-car music, especially those involving Bluetooth streaming from phones etc. Sound quality is excellent too (at least in my X with premium sound). I hope the M3 premium sound is as good.
interbear
Active Member
I
The Model 3 Premium audio system sounded awesome when I tried in in-store.
I think the in car Spotify will more than satisfy my music needs for driving, I tend to listen to the radio in the car anyway and as I understand it the Model 3 has both DAB and internet radio so that plus the Tesla Spotify account will cover everything I need. I use Apple Music at home and on mobile but I’m not really bothered about not using it in the car to be honest. Probably because I don’t really build many playlists but listen to albums. Old school
Spotify will no doubt let me do that easily enough so good enough.
The Model 3 Premium audio system sounded awesome when I tried in in-store.
I think the in car Spotify will more than satisfy my music needs for driving, I tend to listen to the radio in the car anyway and as I understand it the Model 3 has both DAB and internet radio so that plus the Tesla Spotify account will cover everything I need. I use Apple Music at home and on mobile but I’m not really bothered about not using it in the car to be honest. Probably because I don’t really build many playlists but listen to albums. Old school
Spotify will no doubt let me do that easily enough so good enough.I
The Model 3 Premium audio system sounded awesome when I tried in in-store.
I think the in car Spotify will more than satisfy my music needs for driving, I tend to listen to the radio in the car anyway and as I understand it the Model 3 has both DAB and internet radio so that plus the Tesla Spotify account will cover everything I need. I use Apple Music at home and on mobile but I’m not really bothered about not using it in the car to be honest. Probably because I don’t really build many playlists but listen to albums. Old school
I think you will be fine. You can search for any artist, album or song on the Tesla Spotify account, even using voice commands if you like. The search engine is actually pretty good. You can add albums etc to your favourites list too for easy recall. There are thousands of ready made playlists to choose from too. It's simple but effective and for me it's taken over from the hassle of creating my own custom playlists. DAB and internet radio also works fine, although I find DAB reception a bit flaky and sound quality takes a big hit over Spotify premium. Internet radio quality is pretty good, but depends on the station. Spotify premium sound quality is consistently top notch.
RjbT3
Member
Interesting. I also find making playlists a hassle.
Do you ever experience it dropping out because of poor data signal?
RjbT3
Member
Only place it sometimes drops out is in our village, which is in a dip between two hills with virtually no data signal on any network. Even then it sometimes manages to keep going. Out on the open road it rarely drops its signal IME. It's a lot better than my mobile phone in that respect! I presume it must have a decent antenna and roams all networks.
Model S owner here - Yes, although it's quit hard to predict when.
The most frequent first/last 20 miles of my commute is on a country road with very patchy signal - part LTE, part 3G, a fair bit of Edge and some NO SIGNAL areas. Listening to any of the Streaming options (Spotify, TuneIn, Spotify-via-Phone-and-Bluetooth) is a bit of a dice-roll under these circumstances: Sometimes the buffering works well enough to cover the black spots, sometimes you'll get 15 seconds or so of digital stutter followed by silence until hitting a stronger signal area. Knowing where "skip track" can be used and where it should be avoided is an artform I haven't yet mastered (I'm assuming "skip to next track" is equivalent to "purge the buffer and re-load from new source" as there's never appeared to be any inter-track buffering going on).
Interestingly enough the other time I can almost guarantee streaming glitches is leaving home - when the car switches from (good) home WiFi to (poor) LTE connectivity around my house.
And back onto the major topic: I was eventually persuaded that a family Spotify Premium account was the best option and I have to say I do like the seamless switching between devices (as well as all the custom playlist and shared history between devices) that this provides. But I still end up using the phone's onboard (downloaded and cached!) Podcast player more frequently than any of the other options....
WannabeOwner
Well-Known Member
I'm exactly the same, 100M where there is no signal. Perhaps I should try driving it faster, although the locals will be out with pitchforks if I did that! Perhaps drop-out depends on how well buffered it is just at the point that I enter the deadspot?
That's what I find too, except I only have a couple of miles of patchy variable signal until I reach relative civilisation with stable LTE. Buffering is very hit or miss. I do wish it had a larger and more consistent data buffer.
WannabeOwner
Well-Known Member
+1 Seems obvious to me, so i have presumed there is a Performer Rights licencing issue.
I suspect MCU-2 cars (Model 3, newer S/X) could have a bigger buffer thanks to more onboard memory on the Atom chipset... No evidence whether they actually do or not, of course. Us MCU-1 owners are probably stuck, though...
The Spotify client is a bit.... barebones and doesn't seem to receive much updating. Even the recent stuttering problems & fixes are "beneath" the actual client at the driver level. Elon's recent teasing of allowing our US friends access to Spotify (...perhaps...) may be the spur to prompt a bit more development in this area. One can only hope....
Never assume Lawyers when simple technical restrictions will suffice
(But to play along: The Android Spotify client - and presumably the iOS one - allows downloading of all songs in a given playlist to a local cache, with only periodic check-ins to the server to verify continued entitlement to play. So I'd be surprised if there was a legal reason there's no larger buffering/caching going on on the MCU Native Client).
WannabeOwner
Well-Known Member
I was assuming that memory for buffer was trivial (well .. there is still the "its all in use" limit of course) and that was unlikely to be a barrier
yes, iOS too, and I had pondered that.
Tesla have a seemingly generous licence with Spotify so maybe some restrictions? but agree hardware limitations would be a showstopper
Does this have to be buffered on-chip? I assumed there was some any-old-RAM lying around (might not be the case, I have no idea what the layout is).
The most obvious point to make is: No-one who hasn't signed an NDA knows how it's arranged/setup/what's permitted so it's all speculation (AFAIK).
But since speculation is fun....
I think the reality is that "Caching" - a la phone Spotify download-this-playlist - is off the cards. Introduces too many variables, too many new config options and too many risks-of-breakage to be worth it for the limited market (bearing in mind the US cars still have Slacker). This might change if/when the US switches to Spotify, as the rewards for developing start to outweigh the risks & costs. The amount of available "Cache space" is also doubtful - the 4GB MMC is right out, that's reserved for OS/logging, and the amount available on SD cards is probably not reliably reservable (I understand especially on older cars with presumably smaller SD cards they're pretty full with map data anyway). And then you'd have to manage it, aging out by least-used or some other metric. Adds quite a lot of complexity to what we already know is a fairly basic client.
"Buffering" - by which I think we mean "download the whole song in one go and play it from local memory" - is entirely dependent on the onboard memory. Which, remember, has to hold the screen buffer, the display assets for the screen (Hmm. Does turning the vector maps into a displayable screen image take more or less memory than the Google Earth Satellite tiles? Dunno... either way, at that resolution it's a non-trivial amount), and all the other high-priority stuff (I imagine the audio bing-bongs, in particular, are kept in memory. Last thing you want when Autopilot dies is for the notification alarm to be swapped-out to disk when it's needed....). Bearing in mind the recent issues with screen display assets being corrupted and requiring a re-boot (...thus re-load from MMC) to clear, there's obviously a fair amount of memory in-use for data. ANYWAY, the point is, bear in mind MCU-1 is a 2010-2012 hardware design, so I'd be amazed if there's more than 1GB memory involved (my 2012 Google Nexus 7 tablet used the same chipset as MCU-1, Tegra3, and had 1GB memory). That won't leave much space for buffering but then even 5MB of MP3 at 128KBit is enough for a 5 minute tune and there's plainly not even that much being buffered by Spotify....
....Against which, when loading a Podcast in Tunein one can easily observe from the skip-to bar's colour how much of it is downloaded and I've been able to (once loaded) skip ahead 30 or more minutes.... Lower bandwidth but still 20-30MB's worth if one loads the same podcast onto one's computer or phone.....
SO: It's clearly a design-choice (or more accurately a lack-of-choice) to have a small onboard buffer for Spotify, that was probably justifiable at the time it was done but hasn't been looked at since. But then, it's fairly clear that the Spotify Client hasn't actually been very high up the list of priorities for attention for quite some time so who knows what the scope is let alone what's likely?
So, as with all speculative posts: Lots of words ending in a big "Dunno".
Sometimes it does appear to buffer the entire song. I've had it where the signal has dropped out, but I can play the last song over and over as long as I don't let it reach the very end of the track. But other times it appears to buffer very little. Given the sheer number of Spotify related bugs over the last two years (some of them rendering it unusable) I don't think it's a very robust application. Stuttering repeatedly during songs when dash cam is active is the latest annoyance. My car is MCU1, so that probably isn't helping, but I know a lot of the Spotify issues affect MCU2 just as badly.
WannabeOwner
Well-Known Member
Can't think why I was considering licencing and memory-shortage issues when that was staring me int eh face - much more likely!
It doesn't help that the "Shuffle" function is laughably non-random. My "Liked" songs playlist is >100 songs but NEXT-TRACK'ing even in strong signal areas will often result in the same 5-10 songs being played in the same sequence, over and over......
We agree that the Spotify client could do with some love.
Fundamentally, though, I think the stuttering isn't actually the fault of the Spotify client, so much as it's an artefact of the poor system optimisation of the MCU stack - I know there have been syslog analyses showing the underlying cause for at least some of the recent stutters is ALSA driver buffer underruns, which is a symptom of an overloaded CPU and insufficient priority of the ALSA thread. Stuttering got a lot better for me - not fixed, but better - when they resolved the bug that was causing traffic info to be polled ever 120 milliseconds instead of 120 seconds, indicating that, yes, resource starvation was a major part of the problem. Map refresh and browser scrolling got a lot better at the same time which was no coincidence.
It would be nice to think that some proper performance analysis and code optimisation would be on the todo list for the developers but I expect adding another game and/or fart app and/or cute way to keep the aircon going with nice graphics enabled is higher up the priority stack.....
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