USB favorites lost after firmware update?

[djbakasan]

For the second time in the last ~3 or so months, I find myself sitting in my car, re-selecting favorite songs off of my USB drive, where I store a few thousand tracks, sorted in folders by Artist. Wondering if there is something peculiar that I'm doing or if others have encountered this as well.

It's rather frustrating and a big time sink, as it takes me over an hour to go through all my mp3s and select favorites. My default listening behavior when not using FM or streaming audio is to jump into my favorites collection and just hit random. This is probably what I do for 75% of the time I'm in the car.

To the best that I can gather, the Tesla media stuff doesn't leave any notion of playlists stored on the USB drive itself, so I don't believe that I'm in some way blowing that away when I add more music. The timing of this happening coinciding w/ firmware updates also strengthens my suspicion that it's stored somewhere in the car's memory and somehow lost as part of the upgrade.

Wondering if I can mitigate by keeping locally stored mp3 playlists (.m3us) stored on the drive as well. Hoping someone else on this forum has encountered similar and has a viable workaround. Despite loving my car, the media experience is one area where my previous Audi trounces the Tesla quite handily.

 

[PaulR]

To the best that I can gather, the Tesla media stuff doesn't leave any notion of playlists stored on the USB drive itself, so I don't believe that I'm in some way blowing that away when I add more music. The timing of this happening coinciding w/ firmware updates also strengthens my suspicion that it's stored somewhere in the car's memory and somehow lost as part of the upgrade.

You are correct... I too have had my favorites disappear several times as up until the latest release it would randomly rescan and result in long, long rescanning times (I have over 18K songs on it) and the favorites would be deleted as it rescanned which took over two hours each time making the USB useless.

t seems that they are stored in a volatile memory which gets erased whenever the USB drive has to be rescanned or the system is rebooted as happens during an software install.

The latest release which I just installed (2.50.114) seems to have fixed the USB drive rescanning problem, but introduced a couple of other problems (random resetting of the new equalizer and fader settings among others)

I was thinking that I might make a folder called "AAAFavorites" so that it will show up at the top of the alpha listing of folders. That would enable me to find that folder easily and to use the Shuffle and Repeat functions which didn't work on Favorites anyway.

I am not a programmer and there may be better ways to do this. Just thinkin.......

 

[djbakasan]

Not all firmware updates have caused me this headache, but the fact that it happens at all is frustrating for sure.

It's somewhat wasteful space wise, but I may just have to adopt your strategy of having a folder with copies of files stored in it that I want to mark as favorites. Anyone know sufficiently about how Teslas handle the filesystem? Wondering if I could just create symlinks to the relative paths where the real files exist....

Tesla's media, USB and otherwise, really really is behind the competition and seems to get very little engineering time / support. It's sadly one of the things I interact with THE most, even more than things like autopilot or more intelligent ways to use the key fob or door behaviors.

 

[PaulR]

I and many others on this and the other Tesla forum feel the same way. In reality, you will find many who admit that Car Play and other methods of media play out there have their faults as well and are far from perfect.

It seems that hook that gets people to plunk down many thousands of dollars on the car is the "autopilot" stuff. That's where the romance is. Though the Media player isn't perfect, it is o.k. for most owners' needs. Eventually it will get fixed and improved. In the meanwhile we are forced to come up with workarounds.

Supratachophobia on another thread (Firmware 8.0) came up with the following which seems to summarize the Tesla owner software/firmware experience:

"In light of the recent update that includes the 5 band equalizer that randomly resets overnight, and the turn signal chime dropping in/out intermittently, here is the ownership side of Tesla software updates:

Cycle:

1. Great anticipation about car software because it will fix all the bugs and have all the new features you want
2. Download software.
3. Praise dev team for keeping us on the bleeding edge, wonder why I ever doubted them.
4. Install software
5. Find 2 features you didn't ask for, but one of them is cool and the other is there if you need it. Realize that 4 bugs have been fixed, but now 2 of them are different bugs affecting the same function or one of those features was taken away and/or changed. And then 1 more bug has been added and 1 feature doesn't work like it used to.
6. Get angry at devs, who's fault it probably isn't because A. They don't own/drive a Tesla every day, and/or B. They are taking their priority/marching orders from someone else who sees the ownership base as needing to just live with it because surely not enough people will complain.
7. Rinse/Repeat"

Rinse/Repeat......

 

[AziwA]

Same problem here. happened twice already but with some strange behaviour:

- First time was on software update, lost all favourites, spent hours re-adding them
- Second time I lost some but not all of favourites (prior to this instance I had ±150 favourites, then one day after update i was down to about 80)
- Third time I lost all of them, no software update between the second and third time. third time was earlier this week.



annoying....

 

[travwill]

My SC is great, but their "solution" to this buggy software version that is freezing all the time, crashing, and forgetting EQ settings was to remove the USB music drive I had plugged in and reinsert it every time after I start the car. hehehe... Still does it without the drive installed and would definitely be a pain to do.

I sure hope for an update soon that fixes whatever is jacked up in my version 2.50.114 :-/

 

[kennybroh]

As far as I can see XM is still useless. No category display. That disappeared 2 upgrades ago.... Frustrating.

 

[AziwA]

Lost all my favourites again today.. fourth time..... im giving up.

 

[Chrisizzle]

I lost all my Favorites when the media player was overhauled. Then, randomly since because my USB seems to reload from scratch way more often than the previous operating system version.

I too have given up on comprehensively selecting favorites until I see they are retained for more than a month. Fortunately, the new search feature makes it easier to just find a song I feel like hearing.

 

[Paul in PalmCity]

You are correct... I too have had my favorites disappear several times as up until the latest release it would randomly rescan and result in long, long rescanning times (I have over 18K songs on it) and the favorites would be deleted as it rescanned which took over two hours each time making the USB useless.

t seems that they are stored in a volatile memory which gets erased whenever the USB drive has to be rescanned or the system is rebooted as happens during an software install.

The latest release which I just installed (2.50.114) seems to have fixed the USB drive rescanning problem, but introduced a couple of other problems (random resetting of the new equalizer and fader settings among others)

I was thinking that I might make a folder called "AAAFavorites" so that it will show up at the top of the alpha listing of folders. That would enable me to find that folder easily and to use the Shuffle and Repeat functions which didn't work on Favorites anyway.

I am not a programmer and there may be better ways to do this. Just thinkin.......

Try using a hyphen "-" or hypen-space "- " before the name of any folder you want sorted at the top of a folder list. Windows and Mac file folders are easily organized to the top of a file list. Also try using two or three digit numbers before folder names so that further organization is easily accomplished. For instance, ten lists would be numbered 01-10 where the leading zero is VERY important to keep things sorted as desired.

 

[djbakasan]

Sucks to have to work around all these types of issues. Even more grating as a software engineer-- while I can empathize with the challenges of shipping software, the constant 2 steps forward, 1.5 steps backward patterns we're seeing w/ media playback to me illustrate a distinct lack of effort / resources being put into truly solving these issues. Which is a massive shame, as on the average, I spend more time interacting w/ the media stuff than say, easter eggs or even autopilot.

I love my X, but w'ere now delving deep into a realm where I have some non trivial day to day quality of life type issues that were frankly better in my previous vehicles (2 Audis, and before that an Infiniti).