USB Music - cover art

[rxlawdude]

Also, I don't know if anyone here is old enough to remember what USB cover art used to look like in the early days of the auto industry. Kinda funny to see 460 posts in this thread begging for that pathetic little postage stamp thing that you can't even see.

For those not familiar, this is what a typical war-era car looked like, generations ago:

View attachment 739137

There is a generation that never or rarely purchased or acquired a physical object (e.g., CD or vinyl) with art on the cover. They download or stream, so I kind of understand the lack of urgency on Tesla's part regarding fixing USB media.

 

[TEG]

I am anxiously awaiting this update as well. If I am interpreting TeslaFi software tracker correctly, (and I’m not saying that is likely), 98.5% of Model 3 LR RWD Teslas have an update more recent than mine, 2021.32.22. I’ve been making sure my car is connected to WiFi every night before I go to bed for the past 2 weeks. Is it my safety score? I just had one bad day when I was driving though a long construction zone and got some unexpected front-end warnings. Maybe in a week when that day ages out. I’m not begging for FSD beta, I just want my album art!

So FSD beta peeps (apparently) don't have album art yet. So you actually want that bad safety score to stay out of FSD beta if you want album art sooner rather than later.

Hopefully Tesla does a "branch merge" soon to get these new things (like Album art) to the FSD beta builds.

 

[JimS]

So FSD beta peeps (apparently) don't have album art yet. So you actually want that bad safety score to stay out of FSD beta if you want album art sooner rather than later.

Hopefully Tesla does a "branch merge" soon to get these new things (like Album art) to the FSD beta builds.

So you think that if I “un-enlist” for FSD beta I might get 2021.40 update? I think some people are doing that just to get a fresh start on their Safety Score so I might try it.

 

[Smithy02]

As others have said, cover art back with 2021.40.6

S02

 

[byeLT4]

Wonder how long we'll be waiting. Sure seems like the update that broke it went out to everyone overnight.....

 

[android04]

So you think that if I “un-enlist” for FSD beta I might get 2021.40 update? I think some people are doing that just to get a fresh start on their Safety Score so I might try it.

You might get the update instead. Last week I "un-enlisted" because my car was on version 2021.32.22 for what seemed like a long time (since the FSD beta button came out) and I believed that it was holding back my updates. I wanted some of the newer things in updates more than the FSD beta, and with a score of 98 I hadn't yet gotten the beta. So I decided to "un-enlist" on Tuesday night, and got an update notification on Wednesday night. Once I updated to 2021.36.8.8 and was looking through the vehicle settings to enable remote TeslaCam viewing I realized that I had actually gotten the FSD beta update! Didn't get a chance to try it out for 4 days due to the Thanksgiving break.

 

[bo3bdar]

Small data point on update. I just got the 2021.40.6 update yesterday, going directly from v2021.32.21. No FSD. I had a pending update to 2021.36.5.5 that I ignored because it didn't have anything I wanted, and it wrote over that to offer 40.6. I tagged the Advanced for updates, which might or might not have done anything.

(Tesla updates have kind of sucked over the last year, so I skip anything that doesn't have either a bug fix I want, or a new feature that I want. That shitty Christmas update last year broke me of just blindly accepting whatever turds Tesla pushes out. Broken USB art, crashing users manual. Lame. I leave WiFi disabled so that it never downloads anything I haven't seen.)

2021.40.6 has several things worth accepting for me:
1) Fixed USB art
2) Tidal is now available. ($1 trial right now)
3) Waypoints
4) Live viewing of Sentry video
5) No new bugs (please!?)

 

[Kevy Baby]

I still don't know what to do with it though. What's the point of having USB music at all if you can't even choose an artist to play? Heck, I can't even *find* the artist I want to play. Why is the alphabet so difficult for them to understand? They seriously still have that same intern after all these screwups?

With over 13,000 songs on my drive, I long ago gave up on that pathetic way to "search." I have organized my music into multiple folders and have each album in it's own folder (and for artists for whom I have multiple albums, there is an artist folder with the album folders contained within that). Sure, it took me longer to load up the drive, but was easy enough to do while watching TV.

 

[SFEV2020]

Anxiously awaiting this [still on 2021.36.5.1] and hoping the hours I invested for my home streaming DAC system thoughtfully tagging all metadata and embedding album art [even to the album single level - "OCD Alert" ] will again be rewarded, and not sabotaged by some lousy 'matching' algorithm that slowly downloads art from some vile 'greatest hits' or 'compilation' OTA database.

I'm very encouraged to hear waypoints will be available, that's just slightly more useful than playlist support to me !

Also, I'll put in a serious plug/recommendation for Tagscanner for those wanting to really clean up their Metadata . The advanced field fixing/copy/paste/CSV upload/Transformation capabilities of this gem are outstanding to me, as is the ease of clipboard copy/paste of album art [and on-the-fly album art resolution selection even beyond 1000px if you so desire though I think 600px is probably ideal in most portable/car situations] .

There are literally thousands of Mac Users who use Bootcamp/Parallels just to use TagScanner ! [doesn't work on Vine etc]. I have tried multiple others and always ended up with issues with Upper/Lower case, wrong album, wrong art [or very poor quality album art] etc,


Also, an incredibly useful feature is the advanced file rename capabilities which can help you auto-magically structure a very tiered artist/album folder structure on your USB drive however you wish, as a proxy for the non-existent playlist support.

I particularly find the 'derive fields from filename' function incredibly useful as typically if I've extracted the music uncompressed from a CD direct to .wav/AIFF etc, the only 'embedded' [sic] metadata' I'm starting from is how I've instructed the extractor to construct the filename.

I guess that last comment about CD extraction really dates me but it will be a cold day in hell when I go Mp3/compressed.
And I recommend DBPowerAmp for converting from ALAC to FLAC [and vice versa]. I believe there's others but haven't found anything quite so reliable to point 1000's of files in a batch mode to do this that can take advantage of multi-core processing/threading to pump them out in no time !

I have no agenda/affiliation [TagScanner is free !] other than wanting to be helpful with my recommendation .

 

[MaskedRacerX]

If anyone wants a solid tagging solution that's native Mac (i.e.,not have to use a VM), I'd highly recommend Picard ("Make it so!") by MusicBrainz:

MusicBrainz Picard

Official website for MusicBrainz Picard, a cross-platform music tagger written in Python.

picard.musicbrainz.org

It's pretty powerful and it's open source, and uses a Python core, so it can even be tweaked at the code level (but works terrific OOTB), and there's a pretty extensive set of really powerful plugins, for example: calculating ReplayGain, creating a nice hierarchy for classical (Work -> Part -> Movement or Opera -> Act -> Number), handling abbreviations for lengthy titles - and you can change the resources it uses for art, etc., in fact, I believe some folks using Tagger are using some of the MusicBrainz backend services for the DB/catalog.

@SFEV2020

I still have a pretty large collection of CDs, and a really excellent Teac CD-P650, it has a pretty excellent DAC, I run it through a little desktop tube amp to some monitors / headphones (can also run my iPad Pro through a desktop DAC to the amp, that's a pretty outstanding setup).

The P650 has a pretty nice feature for "one button" ripping, just plug in a USB drive, drop in a CD, press record.

 

[TunaBug]

So does that mean that the car is fetching the cover art images from the internet, instead of using the ones embedded into the MP3 files? Hopefully there's some logic in the system which first checks to see if there is an image in the file and uses that one if present but if none is found, then goes out to the web and grabs whatever it thinks is appropriate.

No it is not fetching from the internet. I surveyed about 20 random tracks in my collection yesterday. Most have several images embedded : front cover, back cover, and frequently several images from the booklet that is included with the cd, or the inside image of a gatefold album cover. The tesla seems to be picking randomly and showing one of those images. There was a case of it displaying front cover from a track that had multiple images, but usually it does not.

 

[rxlawdude]

No it is not fetching from the internet. I surveyed about 20 random tracks in my collection yesterday. Most have several images embedded : front cover, back cover, and frequently several images from the booklet that is included with the cd, or the inside image of a gatefold album cover. The tesla seems to be picking randomly and showing one of those images. There was a case of it displaying front cover from a track that had multiple images, but usually it does not.

But if you download a FLAC or MP3 from an online source, which album art would be embedded? Many songs appear on several albums. So is the "Don't Stop Believing" track you download a la carte from the original Journey album it was released on, or some "greatest hits" compilation?

 

[MaskedRacerX]

But if you download a FLAC or MP3 from an online source, which album art would be embedded? Many songs appear on several albums. So is the "Don't Stop Believing" track you download a la carte from the original Journey album it was released on, or some "greatest hits" compilation?

It should match the specific source / metadata,i.e., for example ...

The Greatest Hits album art from this download:

And the Escape album art from this download:

And if you're tagging / re-tagging files, where there's multiple sources, with the right tool (see a few posts above), where it's identified on multiple sources, you can actually select the one you'd like:

 

[rxlawdude]

It should match the specific source / metadata,i.e., for example ...

The Greatest Hits album art from this download:

View attachment 739438


And the Escape album art from this download:

View attachment 739440


And if you're tagging / re-tagging files, where there's multiple sources, with the right tool (see a few posts above), where it's identified on multiple sources, you can actually select the one you'd like:


View attachment 739441

That's true, but in my experience, the tools are not very reliable. Which app are you using for the screenshots above?

 

[MaskedRacerX]

That's true, but in my experience, the tools are not very reliable. Which app are you using for the screenshots above?

That's Picard by MusicBrainz, see my post #470 above (it's for MacOS), and the post above mine has a recommendation for a good Winders™ app.

 

[heavyD]

Tesla newbie here. I'm considering a M3P purchase early 2022 but I'm having a difficult time getting my head around no CarPlay, Satellite Radio and what appears to be an obtuse interface for playing music. I understand that you cannot use iPods or iPhones via usb for music in these cars but how workable is the music interface when going through Bluetooth via phone? Do you still get album cover art, playlists, etc?

 

[TunaBug]

That's Picard by MusicBrainz, see my post #470 above (it's for MacOS), and the post above mine has a recommendation for a good Winders™ app.

I also tag my library with Picard.

If I examine the troublesome files in Foobar2000, just to use a second app in the spirit of double-checking, Foobar agrees with Picard about which file is the front cover and which is the back cover. It's Tesla that is off.

 

[TunaBug]

But if you download a FLAC or MP3 from an online source, which album art would be embedded? Many songs appear on several albums. So is the "Don't Stop Believing" track you download a la carte from the original Journey album it was released on, or some "greatest hits" compilation?

I'm not sure how to interpret your question. For the case of a single track that you have downloaded but the track appears on many albums... that's not relevant to what I am describing. A FLAC file, and I'm pretty sure other music formats too, allow multiple pictures to be stored in a single music file. In addition to the pixels, length, and width, another piece of data stored with the picture in the music file is what it is a picture of. For example, you can store front cover, back cover, the booklet, a picture of the actual disc, etc all in a single FLAC (and if you're tagging with Picard then you may have that without realizing it).

The 2021.40.6 Tesla software seems to just pick one picture randomly. It doesn't matter which album the picture came from, or if you have replaced it with a picture of your cat. I'm using "random" loosely: I doubt the code actually finds all the images and picks randomly. It might instead, for example, have to do with which picture it finds first when extracting the metadata, and the order pictures are stored in the file can change as you fiddle with metadata and depending on library that you're doing the fiddling with.

The Mutagen library (used by Picard for tag manipulation) shows that the images in FLAC files use the id3.PictureType, and you can find a list of those types at mutagen/_specs.py at master · quodlibet/mutagen. Or perhaps a more authoritative reference: id3v2.3.0 - ID3.org

 

[MaskedRacerX]

Tesla software seems to just pick one picture randomly.

Have you experimented with order and/or size? I mean, I'm not about to go through album art gyrations to accommodate some janky Tesla code, just curious if there's some identifiable "logic" (quotes by design ).

 

[sduck]

I can't believe it took them a year to fix this. Their inability/unwillingness to fix this, along with several other things, was part of the reason I sold my tesla and won't be buying a new one.