USB Music - cover art

[Merrill]

Pure speculation:
1. When you insert a USB drive, the software “indexes” it - looks at each individual file to learn title, artist, genre, cover art, etc so it can provide a list of music sorted the way you’d like to see it.
2. When the computer goes to sleep, they need to store this information some place so they don’t have to re-index every time you get in the car. Tesla for some reason doesn’t want to write to your USB music drive, so they were storing that information on eMMC or some other internal storage medium.
3. To reduce the space needed on that internal storage, they choose to eliminate the cover art, which likely takes 100 times more space to store than all the other info.
4. Now, there are much more logical and simple) ways that they could solve this issue if the USB music Player was of any priority to them. Obviously it isn’t, so don’t expect any solution to this problem any time in the near future.

I do not buy into this, they have all the bs games, Disney on and on. Get rid of that stuff and put in album art.

 

[Frank99]

Well

Nah, it's simply BAD programming on Tesla's part.

IMHO, Tesla didn’t write most of the code in the music Player. My belief is that they found a public domain (or BSD licensed, for the technically inclined) music Player way back when, made minor modifications to make it work in their cars, and that’s the basis for what we have today.
Still kinda unforgivable that they haven’t replaced it with something better.

 

[Azathoth]

Well

IMHO, Tesla didn’t write most of the code in the music Player. My belief is that they found a public domain (or BSD licensed, for the technically inclined) music Player way back when, made minor modifications to make it work in their cars, and that’s the basis for what we have today.
Still kinda unforgivable that they haven’t replaced it with something better.

Likely true, but still a sad commentary.

However, what bothers me even more than the lack of album art is the failure to simply resume USB music playback when I enter the car (this stopped working after an update sometime around November of 2020). The only apparent work-around to THIS foible is to leave sentry mode on (which sucks the battery dry when the car is just sitting in my garage) or by doing the "open door, wait for boot, close door, open door again and enter the car" dance.

It's just shameful that Tesla can't (or doesn't care to) get these basic functions working after breaking them months ago.

 

[Frank99]

Agreed, and starting with 2021.12.25.7, USB resume seems to fail for me every single morning, where before it only failed about 1 in 4 times. Resume failure is unforgiveable; speaking as a working software engineer, it shouldn't take more than an hour or two to fix it if the failure is what I think it is. Album art (at least making it visible during playback) is also unforgiveable - the car doesn't need to create a database of album art, it only needs to read the art when it starts playing the song. That's another hour or two of work.

 

[sduck]

Oddly enough, the resume functionality seems to be working better for me. It's actually worked flawlessly since getting 12.25.6, and I just got 12.25.7. I had an extreme example of things working right actually - I pulled the music drive out to shuffle some files around on it, as I'm prone to do about once a week, and when I put it back into the car an hour later, the car put me back exactly where I left off - no need to hunt around, find the right file or anything!

 

[finman100]

try this. works for me. open driver's door, do not get in car yet. wait to see if your USB music starts up. Mine rarely does. close the door. re-open door and 99% of the time the USB music starts up! is that insane? well it works for me. But having to open the door, then close, then re-open is such a band-aid to actually fixing the problem. oh well. give it a try. I'm on 2021.4.18.2 in a Long range Rear drive 2018 Model 3. 55k miles of pure bliss so far!

 

[RayK]

Variations of that generally works for me:

1. Open driver's door, lift butt off of seat, close door, then sit back down.
2. Open driver's door, lift butt off of seat, sit back down, then close door.

Yes, a band-aid, but one that seems to work. I'm on 2020.40.8, the version prior to this USB album art fiasco.

 

[TunaBug]

Funny that the cover art is the flaw that gets all the attention. At least that has a plausible explanation in that it was disabled to reduce the type of eMMC NAND flash memory writes that were causing failures.

What about the fact that it doesn't scroll to the right letter? And when you go "back" from an artist it goes back to A instead of going back to the artist you were browsing? So you have to scroll to the wrong letter all over again. And then even if you do find the artist you're looking for, you can't even play by artist - only by album.

Not being able to play the band you want to play is by far the worst flaw in Tesla's pathetic attempt to reinvent the MP3 music selection technology that was perfected in the 1990's. Is the intern in charge of this really that dumb? If so, why do they keep getting brought back every summer?

View attachment 689818

I agree with you that the things you mention are much more frustrating than lack of album art.

Personally, I think the biggest problem with USB playback is that it is not gapless. The gap it inserts between track is under one second, but that can be a big deal for some things, bigger than any benefit from being lossless.

There's also the broken metadata handling: I shouldn't have to overwrite Artist with Album Artist. Yes I know there are tools to help make that suck less, but still highly frustrating.

Then I'd put in @Gauss Guzzler 's list. I'm jealous that you get "M" by tapping on "N". I think I have to hit "T" or something further down.

Then lack of album art. Perhaps it gets mentioned because it's pretty much the only problem is passenger is aware of, unless they managing to get me started on this topic.

I admit that I get irrationally frustrated about this. It's not because this is a horrible distraction from the driving experience, but because as others have pointed out it's been expected to be a solved problem for multiple decades.

 

[Kevy Baby]

try this. works for me.

Variations of that generally works for me:

If I turn on the car prior to getting in (which is almost always as I like to turn on the climate to get the temperature where I want it), it ALWAYS picks up where USB playback was when I was last in the car. To the point that I often pausing tracks when I get out of the car as the car likes to listen to my music when I am backing into and pulling out my garage using dumb Summon (and not inside the car). And it likes to play the music fairly loud (as I KNOW I wasn't playing it THAT loud ).

I agree: you shouldn't have to do this, but at least it is a consistent work-around.

 

[anti]

The latest update (2021.12.25.6 for me) broke something else.

I leave the mini player up on the screen (still leaves plenty of visual for the map but lets you see what track is playing). You USED to be able to tap where the cover art should be and it would bring the viewer to about half screen (with more info available), tap again and it brought up full screen, and finally tap again to go back to mini.

That functionality is now gone.

yep, Tesla software engineer incompetency strikes again...

Thanks for breaking something else I used almost everyday Tesla.

 

[DadRS99]

yep, Tesla software engineer incompetency strikes again...

Thanks for breaking something else I used almost everyday Tesla.

Totally agree on all points!
- album art
- resume
- play by artist
- go back to same spot
- more accurate scrolling

if the sound system wasn’t so hood (best I’ve ever ever heard in a car) I would prob return the vehicle!! Y dual motor.

that said, can we get Fred from electrek or someone Elon has responded to in the past to tweet about this???

 

[Nobleman]

2021.24.3 update - no fix. Also, I hate that these updates keep changing my hvac settings and also the audio balance, so each time I have to reset these. There is no earthly reason an update needs to do that.

 

[FalconFour]

It's frustrating that we're all still left out in the cold here. But which one is used less - USB media, or Slacker, at this point? I'd expected a great Slacker exodus once Spotify support was added. haha. Or Caraoke...

Not sure what to think anymore. Are they working on a UI refresh for the 3, and that's what's held this up? That was my theory in the past. Or are they just completely unaware?

This is one of those problems that's so absurdly easy to fix, it's like... I'd work to get a job there, first day, dive into the code, convince them to let me work on "something someone asked me to do", spend a day fixing it, then before I even get any assigned work, be like "peace, I fixed the bug that's been bugging me for a whole year" and ... quii.... uhh... no, I couldn't quit a job at Tesla. A job there had been my dream for almost a decade now. lol.

I'd friggin' do it!

 

[Candleflame]

Anyone know how to fix that the search function doesnt search the usb drive ans neither does usb show up as a source (despite being able to be picked and played from the media menu).

Have had that since end of 2020...

 

[FalconFour]

Pure speculation:
1. When you insert a USB drive, the software “indexes” it - looks at each individual file to learn title, artist, genre, cover art, etc so it can provide a list of music sorted the way you’d like to see it.
2. When the computer goes to sleep, they need to store this information some place so they don’t have to re-index every time you get in the car. Tesla for some reason doesn’t want to write to your USB music drive, so they were storing that information on eMMC or some other internal storage medium.
3. To reduce the space needed on that internal storage, they choose to eliminate the cover art, which likely takes 100 times more space to store than all the other info.
4. Now, there are much more logical and simple) ways that they could solve this issue if the USB music Player was of any priority to them. Obviously it isn’t, so don’t expect any solution to this problem any time in the near future.

I don't really buy that either. Any time you'd play a track from USB in the past, it'd be "grey music note" for a split second, then pop up the album art. That suggests album art was never part of metadata. Also, every time the drive starts, it _does_ index it all over again, it seems. That seems to be what makes resuming fail - every time the drive is plugged (which includes any time it powers down, when the car goes to sleep), it loads for some seconds.

Also, this all broke when the Spotify UI refresh came out - when we got the ability to customize what sources were shown, etc etc... so it came with a bundle of media UI changes. Now it's been updated a few more minor ways since then, but it's still broken.

Not only is it not necessary to cache album art (it'd be better if it were pulled at the track level on every track anyway), but it doesn't seem like it was in the first place.

However, lending to that theory, and still unexplained, is why it grouped album art at the album level anyway, instead of at the track level - since it was pulling from track ID tags for the data anyway. Doesn't really make sense why it used to behave that way (before it broke completely).

 

[tomas]

Ok if it wasn’t stored, then riddle me this: how were you able to scroll through albums with list showing thumbnails?

Of course it was stored. Nobody has come up with a more believable explanation of why art was disabled than EMMC storage… so that theory is still prevailing.

PS, own 3 teslas, never saw gray for a sec before art. OTOH if art not tagged right, it used to go to internet and fetch, which produced sometimes hilarious results. Maybe that’s why your lag. Anyway, cannot prove anymore as art is off.

 

[MaskedRacerX]

Just index it back to the storage device. I'd be totally OK for a small bit of delay for a pre-scan of art/meta-data each time, and heck, write out a simple checksum to determine if the device content has changed. A little optimistic caching as you scroll, this is not, *ahem*, rocket science

I'm assuming it's what @Frank99 indicated above: they're using code that wasn't developed in-house and they don't want to dedicate the resources to either, 1) do a full code breakdown, re-engineer as needed - or - 2) do a ground up USB media player development

I'm a software dev/architect (~25 years), and while I've mostly been indie, I've done a few team gigs, and I totally get the "This works fine as is, it's not preventing product from shipping", especially if it's something that wasn't home grown, and you don't have the immediate SKE to fix it (they probably just tweaked some config file, prescan=false; cache=false ...)

I almost exclusively use USB for music, I mean, if I'm being honest, I'd prefer CarPlay, but that aside, at least a reasonably well implemented USB player. My __hope__ is that we'll get a completely revised media player in the new major version.

 

[sduck]

Also, every time the drive starts, it _does_ index it all over again, it seems. That seems to be what makes resuming fail - every time the drive is plugged (which includes any time it powers down, when the car goes to sleep), it loads for some seconds.

On my car it only re-catalogs the usb drive when I first insert it. It resumes without re-indexing over power cycles thereafter, until I pull it and shuffle things around on the drive again. Maybe that's a benefit of using ext4 for formatting? Or just a fast drive?

 

[sduck]

Ok if it wasn’t stored, then riddle me this: how were you able to scroll through albums with list showing thumbnails?

The various lists that my model 3 displays (albums, songs, genres, folders) has never shown album art thumbnails.

 

[anti]

The various lists that my model 3 displays (albums, songs, genres, folders) has never shown album art thumbnails.

I also never saw a "list showing thumbnails".