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USB Music - cover art
- Thread starter Smithy02
- Start date
Gauss Guzzler
Safety Score = 42
But seriously, all you folks complaining about the album art - what do you even do with the USB media player anyway?
Without the ability to play by artist I can’t even figure out what possible value the thing has. It can only play one song. Maybe two at best and then it craps out because there aren't anymore songs on the drive with the *exact* same album name.
Why are you all so worked up about the way it looks if it doesn't even do anything useful anyway? Shouldn't we be hoping for basic functionality first?
Without the ability to play by artist I can’t even figure out what possible value the thing has. It can only play one song. Maybe two at best and then it craps out because there aren't anymore songs on the drive with the *exact* same album name.
Why are you all so worked up about the way it looks if it doesn't even do anything useful anyway? Shouldn't we be hoping for basic functionality first?
RayK
Active Member
Shuffle mode. I grew up listening to (terrestrial - FM) radio, buying LPs and much later on, CDs. I remember what a good cover art design looks and feels like. Try that with an MP3 download.
Will wait for the first "Okay, Boomer" response.
Will wait for the first "Okay, Boomer" response.
Gauss Guzzler
Safety Score = 42
How do you do shuffle mode? Not that I want it to randomly select amongst 40,000 songs anyway, but don't you still have to pick an album or genre first?
You tap the icon that looks like the one below (it's a fairly universal icon for shuffle). I like shuffling all my songs: you go from industrial to country to classic rock to pop to Pink Martini...
I use USB audio almost exclusively when I am driving. Just a bunch of folders by genre filled with songs.
If you do a "curated mix tape" of your favorite music it is great. Sound quality can be excellent, and better than streaming or Bluetooth.
If you do a "curated mix tape" of your favorite music it is great. Sound quality can be excellent, and better than streaming or Bluetooth.
MaskedRacerX
Member
I said hi to him at an AR/VR event about a decade ago in SF, I'm sure he remembers, I'll hit him up ... "Yo, JC, got a second?"
sduck
Mr. Duck
That's ridiculous ("ok boomer"). There are other ways of using the usb system. I always play albums, or "playlists" - basically mixtapes. It works great for that! And I use it all the time, almost 100% of the time I'm driving.
Gauss Guzzler
Safety Score = 42
No, I honestly don't know how to do that. How do you play a "playlist"? Do you arrange the songs into subfolders and somehow play the folder you want? Or do you tag edit your songs to assign a playlist album name?
The MP3 player in the car doesn't support playlists, to the best of my knowledge, so your two suggestions are probably the best workarounds for playlist-type functionality. For tag-editing, you could either set the Genre, Album name, or Artist name - but what a PITA. Flash drive space is cheap these days; using folders is probably the easiest.
I have one folder ("Frank's Sounds") on my drive that has my favorites - about 1000 tracks worth that I just play on shuffle. Then I have a bunch of albums in their own folder (artist\album) for when I want to relive the 70's and 80's - Pink Floyd's "The Wall" or "Dark Side of the Moon", "Tommy" (the soundtrack, natch), various Jethro Tull or David Bowie albums, etc.
I have one folder ("Frank's Sounds") on my drive that has my favorites - about 1000 tracks worth that I just play on shuffle. Then I have a bunch of albums in their own folder (artist\album) for when I want to relive the 70's and 80's - Pink Floyd's "The Wall" or "Dark Side of the Moon", "Tommy" (the soundtrack, natch), various Jethro Tull or David Bowie albums, etc.
TunaBug
Member
Sorry for not posting this a couple of weeks ago, but I seem to have accidentally fixed the scrolling. I tap "P" and now I get the first "P".
I was adjusting the metadata on the flac files in the car, in particular, I have now set the artist to be either the Sort Album Artist or the Album Artist. So, for example, all my Beatles tracks will have an artist of "Beatles, The", and not "John Lennon" or whatever. My intent there was to at least get the albums to be correct once I managed to get the album on the screen. But in the process the scrolling in Artist view started to just work.
I don't know exactly what it is that caused it to work. Things that I have thought of:
* Just reindexing a few times
* Changing the artist field has certainly changed the distribution of A's, B's, C's, etc.
* I have noticed that for some things the Tesla uses the directory name for things, and by copying album artist to artist it means that the artist now matches the folder names.
* probably something completely unrelated to what I've listed.
Anything I listed would be indicative of how poorly designed the whole thing is. But it's certainly less frustrating this way.
By the way, within an artist, if you want to sort the albums, that's done based on the directory, and not the metadata.
It's been mentioned, but yes, subfolders are how to organize.
For me, here is what I have done (with over 12,000 songs):
- In the main Music Folder, I have two groups:
- Four folders of sub-genres *:
- aa Demo Music (This is for the people who installed my system to use when demoing to prospective new clients - I let them borrow my car occasionally)
- ab Rock Albums - complete albums, each in their own sub folder
- ac Albums - same, just not Rock
- ad Songs - the rest of the individual tracks that don't fall into another category (including below)
- Several Artist Folders - for any artist for whom I have multiple albums - each in it's own folder
- I put a sequence number at the beginning of each album folder name to put them in release sequence. If more than 10, you need to use two digits (01, 02, etc.)
- Four folders of sub-genres *:
One thing I keep thinking about testing is shortcuts (aliases): if I create a shortcut to a track and place that shortcut into a separate folder to create a separate playlist with, will it play all the alias in that folder? Not sure this is practical, as I would have to build the separate playlists manually on the file level and it sounds kind of tedious.
One other thing I don't know is how many sub folders deep you can go. I have three-deep without issue currently but I don't know how far you can go. I suspect it will be the Fat32 character limit of directories + file name of 255 characters, but I don't know if Tesla is shorter. I don't know what the limit is in EXT4.
FalconFour
Member
To be sure: we're absolutely not saying the USB Media interface is at all excusable, as a piss poor, zero-effort "feature checkbox" that someone probably spent 1 day implementing in the bare minimum way possible. But even prior to this USB media album art issue, it was bad enough to be near inexcusable. I guess it's just about "can we please stop breaking things and start fixing things". As you can see from the chronology in the last page, it's gone way downhill since the Model S and its fancy, flashy UI. As a 3 owner that originally thought the flat design looked nice, looking back, I really... really miss that eye candy now in a sea of bleached plain paper text.
To shuffle, go to Tracks listing and just smash anything, then tap shuffle and skip. Voila, now every available song is shuffled.
To make "playlists", exploit the artist:album grouping of the system's tagging. That means creating fake "albums" all with the same artist/album, with the titles containing "Artist - Album". Of course you practically have to use software like Tag&Rename to make this somewhat practical. And of course this is a dumpster fire of a workaround that I think precisely 0 people think is appropriate/ideal.
But it's the only way to get music through a lossless pipeline in the car, for those of us with irrational compression-artifact OCD. Aux input - nope. Lossless Bluetooth - nope. CD audio - nope. PCM audio through iOS USB compatibility - nope. All we've got is FLAC.
To shuffle, go to Tracks listing and just smash anything, then tap shuffle and skip. Voila, now every available song is shuffled.
To make "playlists", exploit the artist:album grouping of the system's tagging. That means creating fake "albums" all with the same artist/album, with the titles containing "Artist - Album". Of course you practically have to use software like Tag&Rename to make this somewhat practical. And of course this is a dumpster fire of a workaround that I think precisely 0 people think is appropriate/ideal.
But it's the only way to get music through a lossless pipeline in the car, for those of us with irrational compression-artifact OCD. Aux input - nope. Lossless Bluetooth - nope. CD audio - nope. PCM audio through iOS USB compatibility - nope. All we've got is FLAC.
I chatted with Phil today about USB album art via Customer and Product Support . His news was not good. I have included the full transcript below.
Basically he said that this is not considered a bug, he called it "expected behavior". He even said that it is a possibility that Tesla may even stop supporting USB music "since vehicles now come with USB-C ports only."
He did tell me about another way to report bugs: "You can submit bug reports using the voice command button on your steering wheel. Press on it and say "bug report" followed with a brief description of the issue."
Full Transcript:
Phil
02:43 PM
Thank you William. How may I be of assistance today?
William
02:43 PM
Ever since version 2020.44 came out in November 2020, USB album art stopped displaying. All we get is a musical note where album art used to be. It had always displayed USB album art ever since I bought my Tesla Model S in early 2018.
Will Tesla be fixing this soon? It is sorely missed by everyone who plays music from USB. Which is also the only way to play CD quality music or higher in a Tesla.
Phil
02:44 PM
Please note that this is expected behavior from the car. I cannot say if it is expected to be brought back, but I will make sure to forward your comments to our engineers regarding this.
William
02:45 PM
Version 2020.44 also broke the ability to do voice searches on USB music, and Recents/Favorites list no longer includes USB music
William
02:46 PM
What do you mean by "expected behavior from the car"?
Phil
02:47 PM
It is normal that this feature was removed after the 2020.44 update.
Phil
02:47 PM
That is what I meant.
William
02:47 PM
WHY??
William
02:48 PM
How is this normal?
Phil
02:50 PM
What I meant by normal is that the feature was removed after this update. We have not received a specific reason why it was removed, but by submitting this kind of feedback is the best way to pressure our engineers to bring it back.
William
02:54 PM
It sounds more like a bug. Why remove a feature like that? How is that an upgrade? How is that an improvement? It worked before, why break it?
Phil
02:54 PM
We never said it was an upgrade or an improvement.
Phil
02:54 PM
Again, it is not a bug and it is expected behavior. If you feel like this might be a bug, you can schedule a service appointment.
Phil
02:55 PM
They will be able to confirm this with yoy.
Phil
02:55 PM
you*
William
02:56 PM
Does this indicate that Tesla will no longer be supporting USB music in future updates?
Phil
02:57 PM
It is a possibility, since vehicles now come with USB-C ports only.
William
02:58 PM
USB drives are not dependent on USB-A ports
Phil
02:58 PM
I know that. However, most people only use USB-A drives.
Phil
02:58 PM
Again, as I said, it is a possibility.
William
03:00 PM
Can you confirm any of this? With the engineers? How can we contact them directly?
Phil
03:01 PM
That is not something that can be confirmed and this would be confidential information. It is not possible to contact the engineers directly.
Phil
03:01 PM
I will go ahead and forward your feedback to them. Is there anything else I may assist you with today?
William
03:03 PM
It this the only way to give feedback or to report bugs to Tesla? Is there an email we can send this info to?
Phil
03:03 PM
You can submit bug reports using the voice command button on your steering wheel. Press on it and say "bug report" followed with a brief description of the issue.
William
03:04 PM
Interesting. I didn't know about that. Where does that info go?
Phil
03:04 PM
It is sent directly to the engineers for review
William
03:05 PM
Excellent. Thank you.
Phil
03:06 PM
No problem, William!
William
03:06 PM
Any email address for the engineering team to give more details?
Phil
03:07 PM
They do not have a direct email address. Bug reports and feedback through our customer support team is the only way to submit feedback as of now.
William
03:09 PM
I hope they make it easier in the future for Tesla owners to report bugs and suggest features.
Phil
03:09 PM
I understand where you're coming from and will make sure to include this in the feedback provided.
Phil
03:10 PM
Is there anything else I may assist you with?
William
03:10 PM
Yes, Thank you for passing all this on to the engineers.
William
03:12 PM
That is all for now. Thank you for your time Phil.
Phil
03:12 PM
My pleasure. Have a good rest of your day and do not hesitate to reach out if you have other questions.
Basically he said that this is not considered a bug, he called it "expected behavior". He even said that it is a possibility that Tesla may even stop supporting USB music "since vehicles now come with USB-C ports only."
He did tell me about another way to report bugs: "You can submit bug reports using the voice command button on your steering wheel. Press on it and say "bug report" followed with a brief description of the issue."
Full Transcript:
Phil
02:43 PM
Thank you William. How may I be of assistance today?
William
02:43 PM
Ever since version 2020.44 came out in November 2020, USB album art stopped displaying. All we get is a musical note where album art used to be. It had always displayed USB album art ever since I bought my Tesla Model S in early 2018.
Will Tesla be fixing this soon? It is sorely missed by everyone who plays music from USB. Which is also the only way to play CD quality music or higher in a Tesla.
Phil
02:44 PM
Please note that this is expected behavior from the car. I cannot say if it is expected to be brought back, but I will make sure to forward your comments to our engineers regarding this.
William
02:45 PM
Version 2020.44 also broke the ability to do voice searches on USB music, and Recents/Favorites list no longer includes USB music
William
02:46 PM
What do you mean by "expected behavior from the car"?
Phil
02:47 PM
It is normal that this feature was removed after the 2020.44 update.
Phil
02:47 PM
That is what I meant.
William
02:47 PM
WHY??
William
02:48 PM
How is this normal?
Phil
02:50 PM
What I meant by normal is that the feature was removed after this update. We have not received a specific reason why it was removed, but by submitting this kind of feedback is the best way to pressure our engineers to bring it back.
William
02:54 PM
It sounds more like a bug. Why remove a feature like that? How is that an upgrade? How is that an improvement? It worked before, why break it?
Phil
02:54 PM
We never said it was an upgrade or an improvement.
Phil
02:54 PM
Again, it is not a bug and it is expected behavior. If you feel like this might be a bug, you can schedule a service appointment.
Phil
02:55 PM
They will be able to confirm this with yoy.
Phil
02:55 PM
you*
William
02:56 PM
Does this indicate that Tesla will no longer be supporting USB music in future updates?
Phil
02:57 PM
It is a possibility, since vehicles now come with USB-C ports only.
William
02:58 PM
USB drives are not dependent on USB-A ports
Phil
02:58 PM
I know that. However, most people only use USB-A drives.
Phil
02:58 PM
Again, as I said, it is a possibility.
William
03:00 PM
Can you confirm any of this? With the engineers? How can we contact them directly?
Phil
03:01 PM
That is not something that can be confirmed and this would be confidential information. It is not possible to contact the engineers directly.
Phil
03:01 PM
I will go ahead and forward your feedback to them. Is there anything else I may assist you with today?
William
03:03 PM
It this the only way to give feedback or to report bugs to Tesla? Is there an email we can send this info to?
Phil
03:03 PM
You can submit bug reports using the voice command button on your steering wheel. Press on it and say "bug report" followed with a brief description of the issue.
William
03:04 PM
Interesting. I didn't know about that. Where does that info go?
Phil
03:04 PM
It is sent directly to the engineers for review
William
03:05 PM
Excellent. Thank you.
Phil
03:06 PM
No problem, William!
William
03:06 PM
Any email address for the engineering team to give more details?
Phil
03:07 PM
They do not have a direct email address. Bug reports and feedback through our customer support team is the only way to submit feedback as of now.
William
03:09 PM
I hope they make it easier in the future for Tesla owners to report bugs and suggest features.
Phil
03:09 PM
I understand where you're coming from and will make sure to include this in the feedback provided.
Phil
03:10 PM
Is there anything else I may assist you with?
William
03:10 PM
Yes, Thank you for passing all this on to the engineers.
William
03:12 PM
That is all for now. Thank you for your time Phil.
Phil
03:12 PM
My pleasure. Have a good rest of your day and do not hesitate to reach out if you have other questions.
The fact that he told you that "bug reports" actually go somewhere for the customer service team to review tells you that the rest of what he said can be completely, 100% discounted as well. They DONT go anywhere, they stay local to the car. All he was doing was attempting to get out of the chat with you.
Wait, what ?!
Newer cars will be different than my older car and so they will remove features from my older car to constrain it to the lack of features in the newer car?!
Next thing you will tell me that they will take radar out of the newer cars and therefore disable it on mine to match...
"Our software team takes pride in making sure updates will provide only lowest common denominator functionality!"
This whole USB Music brush-off looks like the conversations with the PMs about the nerfing and slow-death of Windows Media Center in Windows Vista/7/8.x
RayK
Active Member
finman100
Member
hey the "bug" that made you swipe up or down on the Music screen instead of just tapping is fixed! 2021.24.4. 2018 LR Model 3. Now you can just tap to raise or lower the Music screen. Sorry if I am not describing this very well.
It's something at least.
It's something at least.
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