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USB Music - cover art
- Thread starter Smithy02
- Start date
RayK
Active Member
I posted this upthread and it works for me, for FM radio, USB tracks and streaming (Spotify) when music resume doesn't (note: I'm already in the car sitting in the driver's seat with the door closed):
- Musical note icon is displayed in place of the album art but nothing is playing
- While remaining seated, open the driver's door. Then lift weight (i.e., butt) off of seat and close the door. Sit back down.
- If previous technique does not work:
- While remaining seated, open the driver's door. Then lift weight off of seat for one second and sit back down. Close door.
Gauss Guzzler
Safety Score = 42
That's interesting @RayK, I had also found a sorta similar method that works.
I was getting all the way out of the car and fully disrobing. I'd cover my body in coconut oil and then jog nude thru the neighborhood for at least 10 minutes but no more than 20, flailing my hands in the air and singing all the Adele songs I know at the top of my lungs. It seems weird but it actually works and obviously it's much faster, easier, and less humiliating than trying to reselect music from scratch thru the broken menu.
You're method sounds a little bit faster tho, I'll give it a try! Thanks!
I was getting all the way out of the car and fully disrobing. I'd cover my body in coconut oil and then jog nude thru the neighborhood for at least 10 minutes but no more than 20, flailing my hands in the air and singing all the Adele songs I know at the top of my lungs. It seems weird but it actually works and obviously it's much faster, easier, and less humiliating than trying to reselect music from scratch thru the broken menu.
You're method sounds a little bit faster tho, I'll give it a try! Thanks!
The album art was magically fixed due to the Tidal app. So, now that it's fixed, does anyone know a way to jump albums? On my previous car, I would move the scroll button and hold on to it until it jumped to the next folder, on the model 3, it jumps to a radio station! Am I doing something wrong?
Candleflame
Active Member
It wasn't fixed "due to the Tidal app" - the fix just came on the same update as the introduction of the Tidal app
Nope. The UI for USB playback is horribly bad. One thing I have done is organize my music into multiple folders on the drive 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.
Doesn't it seem odd that the Tidal app supposedly streams in FLAC and all of a sudden the album art appears on our lossless collections?
I also put multiple folders with each artists, and each one contains the album of their release date. The problem is, I can't take my eyes off the road to select the next album on the list, without multiple clicks. It got to the point where I merged all the albums into one folder, renamed them all the same using foobar 2000, so I would have one constant track playlist. But, this causes tracks to be scattered by track number and not release date. I also used the grandfather tag program to rename and order the list, but this takes forever! My 2017 Honda handled this better!
Gauss Guzzler
Safety Score = 42
My 2003 Mini Cooper handled this better. Actually it handed it flawlessly, it understood how the alphabet works, remembered exactly what was playing, including random/repeat settings, and even had the ability to play by artist, not just album, genre or folder.
Oh, and it could play m3u files too, not just mp3, FLAC, WMA, etc.
Oh, and it could play m3u files too, not just mp3, FLAC, WMA, etc.
Not in the least. You're making a connection where one doesn't exist.
And the album art appears on lossless and lossy tracks alike.
FalconFour
Member
welp. What better time to jump back into this thread
My interests intersect between the hardware and the software - and I can give a little of both.There are valid points on both sides: that Tesla seems to be sloppy in important things that matter - UX, feedback, media UI, software regressions. But the other valid point is that Tesla's hardware is second to none. A "battery" is far more than a cell, a "drive train" is far more than a motor, and a "charging network" is far more than just an installed number of stations. I work in the EV space (I won't say whom
but not a competitor), and Tesla's engineering nitty-gritty is absolutely held as the gold standard to aspire to - they can do it better than anyone. It's used as a point of inspiration to hang other ideas on and try and iterate upon. The way cells are arranged, bonded, managed, protected; the scale at which they do it; the level of control they have over suppliers and chemistries... all absolutely nuts. Same with the power train. And the Supercharger network -- again, setting examples, with Electrify America implementing plug-and-charge at last (something Tesla did in ... what, 2013? and payment in 2018?), on cars that support it. Tesla led, and it matters. (lol)And yet, Tesla's success in sales, and obsessive focus on manufacturing and development - not necessarily improving what exists or maintaining existing customers - leaves a hole wide open for competitors to come in and do it a little better, or to serve the "Elon Musk hater" market (a growing market segment with so much distortion and outright lies paraded around memes and culture lately). Tesla has had the "I'm #1 so why try harder" attitude w.r.t. literally closing down avenues of customer communication and feedback. Service is kind of a mess, highly dependent on location and mood/who you talk to. They're completely opaque w.r.t feedback about bugs or quirks, and "bug report" as a voice command seems like just a paper shredder placebo. But they HAVE so many features and unique takes on things, it's an entirely different universe.
That old media screen from 2003 couldn't play FLACs, and it could never be updated to improve, play new services, or ... play YouTube or Disney+ on.
The reason I think most of us were making so much noise over it was because it's such a dang simple problem to solve. It shouldn't've taken a thread to get fixed. It shouldn't've taken 12 full months (almost to the day) to get fixed. Tesla could've at least acknowledged the issue in any way (their support folks weren't even really aware of the issue). It's so easy, it's unbelievable it took this long and this many words to fix.
Finally, a holiday update I'm looking forward to, as an FSD Beta user (it's... it's a mixed bag, but I wouldn't trade it for the art) that's out of feature-parity sync for a while now. Tuesday, baby!
FalconFour
Member
now, regarding the actual functionality, let's see here!
I REALLY hope this has improved, so if someone with the art update wants to give a spoiler, I wouldn't complain.
Background of the issue is important in the first place: theoretically, the reason USB media album art was "broken" to begin with was that the USB media engine made a database out of the drive, and it extracted and stored album art at the album level -- so folks with 11,000-song collections would end up blowing up the media library that's stored on internal system storage. They stripped out the album art to de-bloat the library file... instead of simply reading it from the FILE THAT'S PLAYING. That would be the optimal solution.
Supposedly, the root of that issue was in a previous version of the media UI, that actually showed an album-cover-browser view of albums on USB. Wouldn't that be nice nah, just text for albums now. But the album art persisted in the database, until it was eventually purged. Maybe by accident, to clean up the bloated DB problem?
This sloppy album-level art implementation left a quirky problem behind though: it picked album art out of basically a random file (first file the scanner encountered on the drive in whatever sequence it reads in - perhaps file table entries, unsorted?), and applied that file's art tag to any playing file that had that artist:album match by name (as it would be grouped at album-level in the UI).
The best way to implement it, as the UI exists today, is just to do this meme:
Just take the art from the file, and put it on the screen... instead of skipping that big chunk of data when it accesses the file.
Then, we could have "mixtape albums" with different art in each tag... and it wouldn't consume space on internal storage with album art.
So, an experiment would be: put files from different albums in the same folder, then unify their artist:album tags so they appear as one album... and see if, when playing the "mixtape album" (should appear as one album when you browse to it), if the art changes at the song level in the same "album".
If it doesn't (it's all one art from one random track of the mix-album),
it's just the same engine, either restored or repaired. I'd suspect they finally wised-up and wrote the database to the USB media instead of internal storage, though.
If it does (changes art with each song in the same mix-album),
it'd be a real Christmas miracle.
I REALLY hope this has improved, so if someone with the art update wants to give a spoiler, I wouldn't complain.
Background of the issue is important in the first place: theoretically, the reason USB media album art was "broken" to begin with was that the USB media engine made a database out of the drive, and it extracted and stored album art at the album level -- so folks with 11,000-song collections would end up blowing up the media library that's stored on internal system storage. They stripped out the album art to de-bloat the library file... instead of simply reading it from the FILE THAT'S PLAYING. That would be the optimal solution.
Supposedly, the root of that issue was in a previous version of the media UI, that actually showed an album-cover-browser view of albums on USB. Wouldn't that be nice
nah, just text for albums now. But the album art persisted in the database, until it was eventually purged. Maybe by accident, to clean up the bloated DB problem?This sloppy album-level art implementation left a quirky problem behind though: it picked album art out of basically a random file (first file the scanner encountered on the drive in whatever sequence it reads in - perhaps file table entries, unsorted?), and applied that file's art tag to any playing file that had that artist:album match by name (as it would be grouped at album-level in the UI).
The best way to implement it, as the UI exists today, is just to do this meme:
Just take the art from the file, and put it on the screen... instead of skipping that big chunk of data when it accesses the file.
Then, we could have "mixtape albums" with different art in each tag... and it wouldn't consume space on internal storage with album art.
So, an experiment would be: put files from different albums in the same folder, then unify their artist:album tags so they appear as one album... and see if, when playing the "mixtape album" (should appear as one album when you browse to it), if the art changes at the song level in the same "album".
If it doesn't (it's all one art from one random track of the mix-album),
it's just the same engine, either restored or repaired. I'd suspect they finally wised-up and wrote the database to the USB media instead of internal storage, though.If it does (changes art with each song in the same mix-album),
it'd be a real Christmas miracle.
FalconFour
Member
lastly, the "oh god why are you nerds even concerned about USB media in the first place, it's not 2005 anymore"...
Streaming pays artists fractions of a penny and is quite corrupt. The new generation of starving artists could have hundreds of thousands of streams on Spotify. Streaming is great for convenience and even for discovery. I pay for Spotify and Deezer -- Spotify for portability, Deezer for paying artists better on things I don't quite like enough to buy (or just want to listen somewhere I don't have the files).
But buying music is coming back, I hope. Bandcamp lets you buy albums, gives most of your money to the artist, and you can download it in FLAC or whatever you want. 7digital also lets you buy FLACs of big-label albums you can't find on Bandcamp. Then, you can eventually just stop paying for EVERYTHING, and take your music whereever -- because you freakin' own it, not rent it, not lose it if you have any reason to not pay that subscription.
Hopefully this comes back en vogue in coming years. Maybe around the time the US actually discovers MiniDisc, though
Streaming pays artists fractions of a penny and is quite corrupt. The new generation of starving artists could have hundreds of thousands of streams on Spotify. Streaming is great for convenience and even for discovery. I pay for Spotify and Deezer -- Spotify for portability, Deezer for paying artists better on things I don't quite like enough to buy (or just want to listen somewhere I don't have the files).
But buying music is coming back, I hope. Bandcamp lets you buy albums, gives most of your money to the artist, and you can download it in FLAC or whatever you want. 7digital also lets you buy FLACs of big-label albums you can't find on Bandcamp. Then, you can eventually just stop paying for EVERYTHING, and take your music whereever -- because you freakin' own it, not rent it, not lose it if you have any reason to not pay that subscription.
Hopefully this comes back en vogue in coming years. Maybe around the time the US actually discovers MiniDisc, though
RayK
Active Member
I've had this for a number of years, but it hasn't been used for a long time. Received it probably around 2004; it was a prize from KUFX.Hopefully this comes back en vogue in coming years. Maybe around the time the US actually discovers MiniDisc, though
I was not able to find a MiniDisc to see if it still works but the FM radio still works. TV band is useless since the change over to digital.
MaskedRacerX
Member
Somewhere in storage, I have some MiniDiscs and some DATs
I was always jumping into the "next big thing" for media standards, until recently I had a nice Pioneer LD player and about 40 discs (I "sold" them to someone for just shipping costs). Hahaha, I still have a couple of HD-DVD discs stashed in my equipment closet (free upon request)
About 10' from where I'm sitting, in at the bottom of one of the credenza drawers in my home office, I have a mint, fully functional external USB Zip drive and several discs, I was going to send it someone so I tested it out, works just like new (never got a follow-up from the person).
RayK
Active Member
I too have some weird (mostly USB) media hardware:Somewhere in storage, I have some MiniDiscs and some DATs
I was always jumping into the "next big thing" for media standards, until recently I had a nice Pioneer LD player and about 40 discs (I "sold" them to someone for just shipping costs). Hahaha, I still have a couple of HD-DVD discs stashed in my equipment closet (free upon request)
About 10' from where I'm sitting, in at the bottom of one of the credenza drawers in my home office, I have a mint, fully functional external USB Zip drive and several discs, I was going to send it someone so I tested it out, works just like new (never got a follow-up from the person).
- Fujitsu DynaMO 1300 U2 Magneto-Optical drive
- Fujitsu DynaMO 640U2 Pocket M-O drive
- HP DAT72 USB drive
- Thinkpad Ultrabay ZIP 250MB drive
- Seagate External DAT drive (SCSI for an old Sun Ultra 5)
FalconFour
Member
Yass!
I only recently got into MiniDisc this year, and picked up a Sony MZ-N707 on eBay. Most players are recorders as well, and with NetMD (as yours and mine both have), you can use WebMiniDisc on a modern PC to put tracks on it - recommended FLAC/WAV source (not transcoded from an MP3) and SP mode with the Web app (source->raw PCM->USB->hardware encoder), as the LP2/LP4 encoder (source->ATRAC3->USB->direct to disc) is kinda trash (I use SonicStage in a Win7 VM to load LP2 songs, mostly - Sony's encoder is way better). MiniDisc is a weird format, inherently lossy coding, and the logical format of the physical disc only supports audio data - no files (a big mistake that I think cost Sony the market share in US). But the format dates back to the early 90s/late 80s, as I recall... nobody thought of data at the time, so the inability to expand into data bit them later. HiMD, which supported data, was too little/too late at the dawn of USB flash memory.It's really kind of a marvel, as a magneto-optical format (laser heats; magnet writes - then laser reads tiny magnetic changes during playback) that runs on a single AA battery for double-digit hours of play. They really crammed an enormous amount of ingenuity into those devices. The media always looks futuristic and it's always a conversation starter at work when I'm playing mine. The organization of sets of music/playlists into discs is a great way to "insert a mood", too - something you can't really touch with streaming.
Since MiniDiscs are infinitely rewritable and digital (thus no degradation with age/reuse), used MDs are always available on eBay pretty cheap, too. In the US at least, there's really no such thing as a pre-recorded MiniDisc. It was a bigger "thing" in Japan where MD took the place of CDs - but pre-recorded MDs are really just a legend here. It's all DIY.
BigNick
Infamous Fat Sweaty Guy
Ugh, I remember spending $500+ on an HD-DVD player back in the day. A Toshiba, I think it was. Wasn't around very long and was nearly worthless a few months after purchasing it. I still have the PS3 I bought at the same time to cover the Blu-Ray side of that lopsided format war.Hahaha, I still have a couple of HD-DVD discs stashed in my equipment closet (free upon request)
About 10' from where I'm sitting, in at the bottom of one of the credenza drawers in my home office, I have a mint, fully functional external USB Zip drive and several discs,
Had a 750 MB Zip drive too, but unloaded that before the "click of death" debacle cause no one to want them anymore.
MaskedRacerX
Member
I had the same brand player and did the __exact__ same thing with the PS3! Heck, a lot of folks attribute BD winning the format war to the Playstation.
MaskedRacerX
Member
@TunaBug
I finally got the update last night! In fact, I went from 36.8 to 44.6 so I got several nice improvements over the just the USB cover art fix.
Or rather "fix", it seems to be janky. A couple of MP3s get the cover art, others don't (and the previous cover art seems "stuck"). Is there a way to force a complete re-index? Maybe just change the content and the system will rescan?
When I have some time I'll review the cover art in the files themselves, see what's present, spec, etc.
I finally got the update last night! In fact, I went from 36.8 to 44.6 so I got several nice improvements over the just the USB cover art fix.
Or rather "fix", it seems to be janky. A couple of MP3s get the cover art, others don't (and the previous cover art seems "stuck"). Is there a way to force a complete re-index? Maybe just change the content and the system will rescan?
When I have some time I'll review the cover art in the files themselves, see what's present, spec, etc.
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