USB Music - cover art

[FalconFour]

I've heard equal conflicting reports about what happens to "bug reports" - but the folks saying they do go somewhere are mostly from Tesla themselves. We still don't really know what's in those big hundred-meg data dumps that happen when you're connected to WiFi and parked at home. Green on Twitter had said they don't go anywhere - but is that really the case, considering only one way/trigger that could send data, or considering delayed/buffered uploads?

Really bugs me that they wall-off any engineering contacts though. But it does make sense in a frustrating, big company way: engineers aren't customer service. Sure as hell would be nice if any UI engineer had interest in participating in these forums though. Many (surely not most) of them are human too Working in a similar field, there's a lot of "card punchers" in the industry... no loyalty to the company or care for the product, thus of course definitely not one to interact with customers... but some folks actually do care and work with love for the product they build. I hope the media team has at least someone with personality, not just spec-sheet card punchers.

 

[Krash]

…Green on Twitter had said they don't go anywhere…

I’ll take Green against any ten service center reps.

 

[ianc]

Everyone is saying they were caching album art to the eMMC without offering any logical reason WTF they would do this. The average size of a flac file is 15 MB. WTF would you cache a 50 KB album art file when you could stream it? It makes 0 sense...

 

[Krash]

Regarding caching, there are lots of reasons not to fetch it online every time.

First, the car is not always online. It does make sense to cache stuff when it is connected for use when it is not connected later. Second there is some latency involved online, even when connected. Additionally, it is a waste of bandwidth, however small, to go online every time when you know that you may play the same song ten or fifty times, especially since when the car initializes it is probably connected over owners’ wifi and not over Tesla’s sublicensed cellular data.

 

[frankusb]

Regarding caching, there are lots of reasons not to fetch it online every time.

First, the car is not always online. It does make sense to cache stuff when it is connected for use when it is not connected later. Second there is some latency involved online, even when connected. Additionally, it is a waste of bandwidth, however small, to go online every time when you know that you may play the same song ten or fifty times, especially since when the car initializes it is probably connected over owners’ wifi and not over Tesla’s sublicensed cellular data.

Why would you need to go online when you have the album art in the file on the USB stick?

 

[MaskedRacerX]

Don't cache, don't fetch from an online source, just check for embedded cover art and load it on the fly, you're already loading the music source file, it's trivial overhead to read a few bytes of meta data each time. And if you do want to , cache it to the storage device. The general issue has been solved by media player software, music devices, etc., for years.

Again, this is some really easy stuff, it's got to be a combination of: 1) Don't care / low priority , 2) Lack of source, 3) No expertise, and I'd guess a possible 4th item may be, it will be solved when the major update comes (so why spend cycles on the old code stack).

It cracks me up how much Tesla is like Apple: you've got some things that are just brilliant, ahead of the curve mixed with other things that a sharp 15 year old could solve over a weekend.

 

[X Fan]

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?

This has been discussed for years on another OP. Use a tagging program and Tesla will be able to group properly. On my two Xa, I can select by artist, album etc very easily with my USB files.

 

[Gauss Guzzler]

Maybe the X is different but the 3/Y can only play by album, genre, or folder - not by artist.
There is an option on the menu to play by artist but it malfunctions and kicks you into album-select mode.

That's why I asked how people are using shuffle mode. I don't want to shuffle thru 40,000 Christmas, Death metal, and 70's songwriters all together, nor do I want to shuffle thru the 1 or 2 songs I have in each "album".

Thanks to the tips above there is a hack that can somewhat simulate the ability to play by artist - sorting everything into artist folders and then playing by folder.

 

[FalconFour]

Regarding caching, there are lots of reasons not to fetch it online every time

*ahem* this needs to be said extremely loudly for those that believe it's true and this might get lost in the noise, but

USB media has never loaded album art from online sources. Ever.

This is easily proven by having songs that don't exist online, with album art you created yourself in MS Paint and put in the tag. And voila... it shows up just like all the others. I listen to a ton of obscure Bandcamp stuff (stan me some death's dynamic shroud.wmv). DDS for example has the NUWRLD Mixtape Club which consists of albums that don't exist anywhere outside that club (no streaming platform - on purpose)... and the album art loads from tags just fine.

The most common mix-up is the source of that album art. The hierarchy of the USB media system is that folders/filenames don't matter at all; it reads and treats all files equally. It reads all the files, then groups them by tag info: first by artist, then by album. If album matches but artist doesn't, well, the album is now two albums, one for each artist/album pairing. Then, the album art is (was) grabbed from effectively a random file (perhaps the first one it encountered for a newly-seen album while it scans), then that album art is provided to every song in that album. So, if you have an album that consists of tracks that had different art, you'll only get one random album art from the folder applied to the whole "mixtape" album.

The reason for caching is likely because it takes a ton of random I/O to read/access every file which is slow with an unoptimized, generic OS running on an Intel Atom potato over USB 2.0. However, at this point with the UI not even presenting any album-art-based view (as in the S in the past), there's no reason to even cache the art in the database... just read it at play time! It's a bit absurd that they don't just display it on playback. It's right there. It's literally RIGHT THERE. In the file. That's being played. 👁👁

 

[Merrill]

Why do we get album art to show when streaming music, but nothing from my usb music.

 

[RayK]

Because whatever "feature" Tesla introduced after 2020.40.8 causes fetching of the embedded album art in the audio file to get borked. Streaming audio is a different animal.

 

[Merrill]

Because whatever "feature" Tesla introduced after 2020.40.8 causes fetching of the embedded album art in the audio file to get borked. Streaming audio is a different animal.Fi

Because whatever "feature" Tesla introduced after 2020.40.8 causes fetching of the embedded album art in the audio file to get borked. Streaming audio is a different animal.

fixing this is not brain surgery, or maybe Elon needs brain surgery.

 

[FalconFour]

I feel like this problem occurred because it was determined that caching the album art was blowing up the USB media library file on internal storage... so instead of fixing it by tweaking the pipeline to just display the art from the current song, they just stopped loading album art and deleted it from the database... without fixing the underlying issue.

I propose a simple solution...

The file is your cache You're reading the song data out of the file, why skip over the album art that's in the file without displaying it?

 

[Gauss Guzzler]

OMG, how much time did you spend on that meme?

Wait. Let me guess. More time than that Tesla intern spent writing the entire code base for the USB music interface?

 

[TEG]

Here is another proposal:

Print out all your album art and glue them to post-it notes. Whenever you play a song, find the appropriate album art and stick it to your screen. Problem solved!

 

[FalconFour]

OMG, how much time did you spend on that meme?

Wait. Let me guess. More time than that Tesla intern spent writing the entire code base for the USB music interface?

A little cloud of dust poofed off the icon when I clicked Photoshop for the first time in ... some months. Gotta make that subscription count, right?

 

[Azathoth]

A little cloud of dust poofed off the icon when I clicked Photoshop for the first time in ... some months. Gotta make that subscription count, right?

LOL, I cancelled my Creative Cloud subscription years ago and went back to using the last Photoshop version before CC ... no monthly fees and I don't miss any of the "new" features they've added over the last 8 years.

 

[FalconFour]

LOL, I cancelled my Creative Cloud subscription years ago and went back to using the last Photoshop version before CC ... no monthly fees and I don't miss any of the "new" features they've added over the last 8 years.

I'll also add that Photoshop was only very loosely involved here. That second photo is actually a pic from Nov 2, 2020 - just when that album came out (thus the photo), and just before the update that broke the album art. So it's proof that we did once have album art

And yeah, the subscription model really makes me not want to think about how much I've spent on Photoshop in the past... number of years. I don't use the new features, why do I keep paying for them? I grew up on Photoshop 6.0, lol. Always been a hobby, not a job, but the cost ($10/mo) is right on the edge between background noise and needless expense. Adobe's really milking that revenue...

 

[bo3bdar]

I'll also add that Photoshop was only very loosely involved here. That second photo is actually a pic from Nov 2, 2020 - just when that album came out (thus the photo), and just before the update that broke the album art. So it's proof that we did once have album art

And yeah, the subscription model really makes me not want to think about how much I've spent on Photoshop in the past... number of years. I don't use the new features, why do I keep paying for them? I grew up on Photoshop 6.0, lol. Always been a hobby, not a job, but the cost ($10/mo) is right on the edge between background noise and needless expense. Adobe's really milking that revenue...

If you don't mind learning a new tool, I found the free software called gimp to be very good.. It's open-source and a good replacement for never ending money for Adobe. Similarly, darktable is a good replacement for LightRoom. Neither are quite as polished as the Adobe software, but I like free for stuff I use only occasionally.

I like and used the Adobe software, and if they had a way to do a one-month payment whenever I needed it, I'd do that. But their pricing plans require a 1 year comittment regardless.

 

[TunaBug]

Has anybody tried experimenting with ways to store the cover artwork? Since Tesla has managed to so thoroughly mess up their interpretation of other tags, I wonder if maybe they show artwork but it has to (for example!) be stored as the booklet artwork (instead of cover) and only shows if stored as 192x192 pixels or somesuch, Or maybe in a sidecar file with a special filename that we haven't figured out.