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USB Music - cover art

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Has anyone suggested likely reasons why it stopped working?

It is crazy that a working feature gets broken and after more than a year it remains broken.

In fact as I was watching the new S launch all I could think is 'why don't these guys just fill USB album art? I it too difficult for them?!'

Radar and phantom braking might be a tough one to solve completely, but USB album artwork!?
 
Has anyone suggested likely reasons why it stopped working?

It is crazy that a working feature gets broken and after more than a year it remains broken.

In fact as I was watching the new S launch all I could think is 'why don't these guys just fill USB album art? I it too difficult for them?!'

Radar and phantom braking might be a tough one to solve completely, but USB album artwork!?
I agree, but remember they have to do the fart sounds and stupid games first.
 
I have missed this feature too. I've only had my car for about a year, but this was my wake up call that the software and the car does not in fact always get better over time. Then that Christmas update really nailed it down- you don't own this car, you agreed to the license agreement with Tesla. They own the Infotainment and you will take whatever crap they want to push out and like it.

Don't get me wrong, I really like the car as a car, but damn I wish Tesla had decent software engineers instead of clown boys. I no longer recommend Tesla to anyone looking for a new car.
 
Tesla software crew is doing a great job

I think that is too broad of a statement.

The cars are far from being purely software, and for the most part I think most owners rate their cars as a whole as good to excellent while interactions with Tesla are adequate to abysmal.

I'd put everything FSD related into a separate category as it is virgin territory.

But stuff like parking assist, advanced cruise control, auto wipers, internal lighting, reverse camera, sound system, driver info displays, phone app etc should just work and keep working. They should not need bug fixes because they should just work. A documented fix for an unforeseen issue is fine, but 10’s of poorly documented updates that seem to introduce glitches more than resolve existing ones isn't good imo.

Also the poor / random / inaccurate info from Tesla service about causes of well known problems is a joke. Album art is hardly a make or break issue but the whole picture including the album art saga paints a poor picture.
 
Much as I'm getting angry about the way Street Level FSD beta was waved in front of our noses and we still don't have it, my impression of the "trivial" and "useless" updates is that they constantly introduce changes, mostly improvements, to how NOA works on the freeways. There's no comparison to how it worked a year ago, in fact i'm amazed at how cleverly it will work through 4 lanes of dense traffic to reach an exit. I use voice commands to find music, avoid fiddling on screen, so cover art seems like a secondary issue. It may have to do with the graphics generation in a displayed list.
 
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I'm suffering from the owner's manual crash bug as well.

This is where simply accessing the owner's manual will completely crash the display. It's possible to do this while driving and the last time I checked to see if it was fixed it took at least 2 minutes for the car to reboot. Prior to this I could use the two button reset, but it didn't work this time.

This has been going on for over a month and is both ridiculous and a safety issue - Owners Manual crashes Tesla's computer . That this has persisted as long as it has doesn't give me great hope here.
 
Has anyone suggested likely reasons why it stopped working?
Yes. Many times. But for every post like that there are 100 just complaining about it so gets buried.

my conjecture: album art was stored with USB music index on EMMC. When Tesla and owners became painfully aware of EMMC life span issues… which threaten drivability and caused a recall, they did everything they could to minimize flogging of emmc… including taking off album art. Turning it off: easy. Redesigning media player (which is ancient borrowed code of dubious quality IMO): not so easy. With Tesla statements that indicate Tidal and other lossless on the way, I suspect this has zero priority with Tesla. In their usual over optimism re software timeframes, they probably thought new UI, tidal, and other goodies would be out soon after they removed the art… making most owners (excluding those who drive largely outside of streaming reach) forget about it. But in reality it’s now been a year and who knows how much longer. Nonetheless, the USB crowd is small, and our big noise is hardly deafening to Tesla. So, I realistically chill and wait for lossless streaming.
 
they constantly introduce changes, mostly improvements, to how NOA works on the freeways.
Sorry for OT reply, but can't resist.

Since 2 or 3 updates ago AP (not even using FSD on these occasions) has misbehaved at a few fairly consistent locations on UK main dual carriageway roads (smaller than US freeway but similar to many Interstates) and had the car steer violently towards the verge coinciding with momentary poor lane markings.

At the moment I am trying to convince myself that I've had fewer phantom braking events with recent updates but not there yet.
 
I'm surprised anyone cares about lossless audio - in a car that's noisy enough at highway speeds to make everything sound equally so-so. I suppose that with enough volume you might recognize better audio clarity, right before you blow out the amps, or the speakers. I guess there's always the romantic camp fire mode or the supercharger stand-by for some HiFi appreciation.

@Battpower I don't know why, but plain AP has always done poorly for me. I only use it on short sections on the streets and expect no miracles. On the other hand Freeway NOA has been nearly flawless of late. There are spots where switching to manual makes perfect sense. Frankly, I'm not out to prove anything, I USE the system actively, to get the most benefit from it. In other words if there's a spot where I know the markings confuse the system, I switch to manual just ahead of time and don't keep beating my head against the same wall to see if it will hurt again. Waste of time.

I thought full NOA with self-lane-changes etc wasn't authorized in the UK. Is it?
I don't know if it's a matter of expectations or the type of highways you have, but I find it very useful and use it all the time. We do most driving on the freeways here, from entrance to exit and then a little surface street route, so every trip starts with a "Navigate to ..." voice command. Watching it plow through lanes makes me grin all the time.

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I'm surprised anyone cares about lossless audio - in a car that's noisy enough at highway speeds to make everything sound equally so-so. I suppose that with enough volume you might recognize better audio clarity, right before you blow out the amps, or the speakers. I guess there's always the romantic camp fire mode or the supercharger stand-by for some HiFi appreciation.
It’s not fidelity, although that’s a plus. My stuff isn’t on streaming.

Phone, Bluetooth, phone media player, car Bluetooth, car media player and each part here fully capable of giving you an issue.

I’ll take the simplicity of a native media player.
 
The cars are efficient, and they look good. Apart from that, what is there? Spotty build quality, questionable ergonomics, often sub-par paint work, etc, etc?

Tesla has had years and they don't seem to have improved these issues much, if any, and the newness has about worn off. If they don't do a 180, in another couple of years the mainstream auto makers will be eating their lunch.

When i bought my car in late 2019, there wasn't much else available in the EV market worthy of consideration. If I had it to do over again today, I'd be thinking a lot harder...
 
I'm surprised anyone cares about lossless audio - in a car that's noisy enough at highway speeds to make everything sound equally so-so.
For some of us, that can really tell the difference between lossless and lossy audio, the distortions and artifacts don't magically go away when you add a layer of road noise. They are still plainly audible to me. While those of us that can hear these differences may be in the minority, that doesn't mean we're not out there.

Hey, wait - this thread is about album art - which you can't hear anyway (or see currently).
 
I think the Tesla software crew is doing a great job. Cover art is trivial. Tesla cars are still the best on the road by far despite not seeing an album cover from your usb stick.

It's not so much the album art itself, no one is arguing that they are going to sell their car because they lost the art.

For me it's a symptom of a much bigger problem- they just don't care about software quality. I'm a professional software engineer in Silicon Valley and have worked at all the big dogs you know. If I shipped code that broke album art like this, I'd be super embarrassed. Or worse, the code that makes the entire MCU crash when simply opening the user manual. If I shipped that, I'd have to quit my job because I'd be too embarrassed to show my face to my peers. This is total amateur hour. Even more to the point, how the hell do you write such shitty code that drawing a PDF crashes the head unit? This is Linux, how is that even possible? Their software is just sad, and they need to be called out on it.

Because I'm in the valley, I know several people who no longer work at Tesla. They all say that it's the usual sweatshop, far too much work, too few people. And no respect for experience or best practices, so they have to make the same stupid software mistakes millions of devs have already made because they of course believe they are smarter than everyone else. Arrogance, thy name is Tesla.
 
Oh, well, as a long time software/hardware engineer, I think I can appreciate the issues, and I'm always amazed at the bitterness of some posters in this forum. Why on earth would you drive a car that you disrespect so much, made by such an incompetent company? If you haven't yet chewed or punched through the accoutrements, I'll gladly buy it from you - at the low value that you place on it :p

Album art from USB sticks is not something I've paid attention to, I watch the road. It could have been dropped from the design for many reasons. Why critical, or a sign of bad software, or diabolical?

And what's this about the User Manual? Granted, the PDF rendering is crude, but it's never crashed the system on me. I just went out and spent 20 minutes entering through the Service and Software pages, and navigating around, with the car both in idle and ready to go. No crash. Could someone who's really having this issue kindly provide bona fide info on how to reproduce the problem, you know, in accordance with good software practices.

It's a long OT subject, but looking at the industry I don't see any of the old car companies eating Tesla's lunch any time soon. I'm thankful to my wife for having talked me into test-driving the Model 3, with its unusual spartan interior, then sticking with getting to know the NOA system, that was initially frightening.

She's a smart woman, and she knows me. I'm a nervous driver with a lot of blind-spot anxiety. Now that I'm very comfortable with (attentively) riding the automation (and not masochistically looking for edge cases it can't handle), it's making it practical for me to drive in freeway lane change and merge situations where my deodorant was failing before :eek: This doesn't come dirt-cheap, but the Freeway NOA is literally a blessing and a joy. I can't imagine pointlessly driving bumper to bumper on pedals and steering wheel now.

It's going to be a good while before any of the old-school car makers, who bolt and weld their first generation EVs together from their ICE parts bins, even come close in the critical AI functionality. Maybe if I didn't have/use the automation and I preferred an interior with more cow hide, dials and more doodads, I would see it differently. But I'm watching the NOA now driving tighter and better with successive updates. Certainly better than me. I'm sure it's a high pressure job with problems, but somebody is doing something right in that Tesla sweatshop.

So, who's going to sell me their crappy despised Model 3 for a song (a song with no album cover art)?
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