Trying to play mp3's without the 400 bugs and hurdles Tesla throws at you...

[drtimhill]

but legit 10G cables for Thunderbolt 3 drives, even

Make sure you are not using Thunderbolt cables .. some will support USB as slow speeds but TB and USB are different technologies and the cables are significantly different (one of the problems with the stupid decision of putting TB and USB on the same connector).

I doubt switching file systems etc will make any difference here, nor physical drives. Its probably that you just have a LOT of music files compared to others. I have approx 6500 songs on my Samsung T5 SSD (formatted as regular FAT32) and it has always worked perfectly.

I suggest removing everything from the drive (reformat/repartion is probably best), then adding songs 5000 at a time, and see if/when you notice things getting unstable. It sucks, but you might have to make a subset of your music collection (or be prepared to swap drives around).

 

[Mr X]

40,000+ songs? You probably spend more time toggling through songs you don't want to listen to just to find a few you do want to listen to


I have around 200 songs I listen to on my USB and always update it. MP3's and M4A's. It's always loaded in my car and never any issues. And then on my SSD I have about 1,000 songs but that's only for road trips with someone else.


Try taking off a few 20,000 songs lol

 

[greenberger]

)By far, the thing that had the biggest impact on load/read stability/playback was removing all the individual album folders.

See, what's fascinating about that statement is that originally, when I first got the car, I had all my files in one folder and it was taking ages to load. I probably only had like 2000 songs at that point, and it would take forever. After a lot of digging, I realized the problem was that having too many files in one folder was killing the car's indexing system. The minute I let iTunes rearrange everything into artist / album / song, the scanning speed zapped right back to normal, and it has remained that way since. But now you're telling me that while more folders improves scanning speed, less folders improves stability. Which is more than confusing.

I tried the Ex-Fat formatting, and 2 weeks in, there's no improvement. The car will reset scan with an ex-fat drive, even if I wake it up before opening the door. So that's a bust.

I would definitely try testing it on another Tesla, if I had another Tesla. The problem with that is, I would need another car for like a week to really test it. A mobil service car couldn't stick around long enough to really prove it one way or another...

 

[Tres_Azul]

@greenberger - Sorry if that was confusing. I also said I could be wrong, and updates may be responsible for that improvement. I wasn't scientific enough about it. (car updated and I didn't restart testing from scratch...)

Also, I had many, many folders, sometimes with only 1-2 tracks in them, and most files from those types of sources had wildly different encoding for bit rate/bit depth/file type.
(>14GBs of old limewire rips were mixed in with my good quality / lossless files that I ripped from my disc collection.)

For the purposes of my earlier comment, 'improved stability' meant:When the stereo was automatically going from one track to another track in random mode, the playback errors basically stopped happening. Where previously, at least 1 track out of 20 would flake as it was being loaded/played, and the UI would give me that little circular arrow overlay where album art would be.

 

[Transformer]

I would definitely try testing it on another Tesla, if I had another Tesla. The problem with that is, I would need another car for like a week to really test it.

If you know someone in the area with a Model 3, you two could swap SSD drives for a week to test.
Are there any other NYC folks in this thread?

 

[MarsOrBust]

So is it better to have all your mp3s in one folder or have several folders?
If you make several folders how are you labeling them "A thru E"?

 

[RichardL]

So is it better to have all your mp3s in one folder or have several folders?
If you make several folders how are you labeling them "A thru E"?

In the early days a group of is spent vast amounts of effort to try to minimize or solve these issues - generally things are better now than they were for quite a time.
We found that having multiple small folders rather than a single big one was much faster for the indexing - something like a 90% reduction in indexing time. Also reducing the size of embedded album art made a smaller difference.
I use mainly FLACs and have a selection of around 5000 'favorites' in the car. I have them organized by artists and album subfolders and I reduce the album art size to 300 X 300 for the car. I rarely see re-indexing now, mainly just the problem of it not recognizing the USB immediately upon startup, so it does not restart playing the way it should.

 

[MarsOrBust]

Confused about your filing system.
Do you put your mp3 under an album or artist folder?
Artist -> Album-> mp3 file

 

[drtimhill]

I've always used Artist > Album > Music File, and its always worked well for me (in other devices as well as the car). if you are using iTunes (or its new equivalent) and your ID tags are well organized, you can get iTunes to reorganize your music into this structure automatically.

 

[metamix]

In the early days a group of is spent vast amounts of effort to try to minimize or solve these issues - generally things are better now than they were for quite a time.
We found that having multiple small folders rather than a single big one was much faster for the indexing - something like a 90% reduction in indexing time. Also reducing the size of embedded album art made a smaller difference.
I use mainly FLACs and have a selection of around 5000 'favorites' in the car. I have them organized by artists and album subfolders and I reduce the album art size to 300 X 300 for the car. I rarely see re-indexing now, mainly just the problem of it not recognizing the USB immediately upon startup, so it does not restart playing the way it should.

I am in the same position. I have a 1TB SSD of mostly flacs, and everything is working elegantly without any problems *EXCEPT* that unless I wake the car up before entering, it seems to time out detecting the USB drive and fails in resuming playback. Mighty annoying at times.

In the winter this is not a problem as I always heat up the car before leaving, but it would be fantastic if they could extend the time the player waits for USB drives to appear before giving up.

(I get the same behavior with the Samsung Evo Plus 1TB SSD as with a 2TB rotating disk I used previously -- everything fine except the timeout and failed resume if the car is not awake when entering.)

 

[metamix]

Confused about your filing system.
Do you put your mp3 under an album or artist folder?
Artist -> Album-> mp3 file

In my experience this does not matter at all. I have a lot of folders with mostly "Artist - Album" syntax in a few folders with names like "flac-16bit","flac-24bit", "mp3-320" and so on. It seems the folder structure is completely ignored, only the ID3 tags inside the music files are used. Great thing about the player is it seems to handle 24 bit and 88 and 96 kHz sampling frequency perfectly.

I use the Mp3Tag freeware program to make sure all ID3 tags are nice and consistent. And Bliss (paid program, I think foobar2000 may have a plugin for this as well) for making sure the cover art is present and correct in all music files.

 

[sduck]

I've always used Artist - Album name for the folders, so that they're arranged like albums would be. But that's cause i'm old, and used to having things organized in the old album system. Some of the stuff that's on my car now as an example -

But unless you're using the folder view all the time like I do, there's not much point in doing it this way - just find a way that makes sense for you and that works with the car.

 

[sduck]

I am in the same position. I have a 1TB SSD of mostly flacs, and everything is working elegantly without any problems *EXCEPT* that unless I wake the car up before entering, it seems to time out detecting the USB drive and fails in resuming playback. Mighty annoying at times.

I don't have this problem - it always picks up right where it left off, no pre-waking involved. I think I posted how I have my ssd set up back on page one of this thread.

 

[MarsOrBust]

I just have one folder labeled music and all the files are in there. They are properly meta-tagged so they display by artist and album. Just not sure if its that efficient to have them all in one folder. Seems to be taken longer to refresh lately despite covert no longer showing up.

 

[metamix]

I don't have this problem - it always picks up right where it left off, no pre-waking involved. I think I posted how I have my ssd set up back on page one of this thread.

I see the enclosure you linked to is unavailable, and I find it quite a tiresome and expensive task to buy a lot of enclosures and disks to find a combination that works well with the usb controller chip in the M3.

If this is really a timeout problem, I wish they could increase that timeout to allow a wider range of disks to resume playback after a deep sleep. Could be a simple constant to change in their code, or that the timeout starts after the non-sleeping state is reached or something. It should be simple to reproduce this issue that annoys so many.

(That said, I have one thing I have not tried, and that is ext4 instead of exFAT. It will give me a lot of extra work as all my Linux computers are Hyper-V VMs without direct hardware access, so perhaps I must dedicate a laptop to transferring music files.)

 

[MarsOrBust]

metamix has the ssd giving you any improvement over your toshiba?
what is your file structure for the music?

 

[metamix]

metamix has the ssd giving you any improvement over your toshiba?
what is your file structure for the music?

No improvements with the Samsung Evo Plus 1TB SSD (2.5" in a USB 3.1 enclosure, not sure about the controller chip) compared to the Toshiba 2TB rotating disk in a Toshiba enclosure. My theory was that the spinning disk was so slow to spin up and connect that the M3 timed out waiting, but it is the same with the SSD. The cable is the 3.1 cable that came with the enclosure.

It may be that the SATA interface between the enclosure and the SSD introduces a delay that can be eliminated by using an enclosure with a NVMe SSD, but the M.2 SSD that @sduck is using is SATA-based, so I cannot imagine there being a difference in the interface. Could be the SATA controller chip in the enclosure that makes the difference perhaps.

 

[MarsOrBust]

I also switched to an SSD with no changes. Using the Evo Plus as well.
What is your current music file structure?
I have all my music dumped into a single folder for now but not sure if it makes a difference in speed.
They are properly tagged.

 

[metamix]

I also switched to an SSD with no changes. Using the Evo Plus as well.
What is your current music file structure?
I have all my music dumped into a single folder for now but not sure if it makes a difference in speed.
They are properly tagged.

I have distributed the albums into perhaps 10 larger folders, one for flac 16 bit, one for flac 24 bit, one for mp3 320, one for mp3 assorted, plus that I add a new folder each time I add music to the drive, instead of adding to existing folders. This makes it easier to do version control and handle editing of tags and cover art for new music.

Rescanning is quite fast, and it never rescans if I have not added/removed music.

As I bought the 1TB SSD and enclosure to solve the resume problem after deep sleep, it was somewhat disappointing to see that it had no effect. :-(

Anyhow I am in the process of connecting the garage door opener to my HomeAssistant setup so I can let it unlock the charging cable when I push the remote to open the garage door, thereby also waking up the car so that it will be ready for me and resume music when I enter the car one minute later. Everywhere else I park, sentry mode will keep the car awake.

 

[sduck]

I see the enclosure you linked to is unavailable, and I find it quite a tiresome and expensive task to buy a lot of enclosures and disks to find a combination that works well with the usb controller chip in the M3.

It is actually currently available, at least in the US. For 17$. But maybe not Norway, sorry. I realize that trying a lot of things can be tiresome; that's why debugging things doesn't always get done. I was going to go ahead and try the nvme route, but this m2 sata thing worked, so didn't bother.

As for ext4 - I bought a nifty little extension application for my mac from Paragon software that adds ext4 support. They also make a similar app for windows I believe. Beats the hell out of starting up a VM.