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USB music - folder structure? "Embedded" cover art?

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New (eleven days) owner here ... looking for some technical details on playing music from a USB stick. Can I assume that album songs are to be stored in folders? Can I store those album folders by Artist in Artist folders? Can those folders be stored in Genre folders?

I am unclear on "embedding" cover art in the music files. I didn't know FLAC did that on it's own. Is that a metadata detail that I need to add?

Can I plug the stick into one of the USB-C ports in my center console?

Jeff
 
The simplest way is to just re-partition the included glovebox drive. It just needs to be FAT32 with a folder on one partition called TESLACAM and then you can put all your music on the other partition. It should be able to handle any standard music folder configuration. I'm weird and put all my files in the root with no folders and it works perfectly fine.

The glovebox usb isn't all that easy to reach so if you have a rapidly evolving music collection you might prefer to use the USB-C ports and either/both of the front 2 ports will work. Don't get caught up by the internet hype about needing a full RAID server in there to protect against the remote possibility that your USB drive might develop errors in as little as 50 years. You might not even have the car for that long.

Unfortunately it cannot read cover art and cannot play music by artist. It can play by album or genre though. MP3Tag is a good program for setting all the metadata (and cover art) in bulk or file by file.
 
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New (eleven days) owner here ... looking for some technical details on playing music from a USB stick. Can I assume that album songs are to be stored in folders? Can I store those album folders by Artist in Artist folders? Can those folders be stored in Genre folders?
Folders work well. Depending on how good at tagging the tracks you are, you can organize the folders any number of ways. I use folders that are like albums - each folder is labeled albumartist - albumname
I am unclear on "embedding" cover art in the music files. I didn't know FLAC did that on it's own. Is that a metadata detail that I need to add?
Album art is currently broken, but hopefully it will be fixed sooner or later. Yes, if you use any decent tagging program there is a place to embed your album art. I use Yate on a mac, it works well for this, but any decent tagging program will work. Just putting a cover.jpg in the folder does not work.
Can I plug the stick into one of the USB-C ports in my center console?
Yes. Note that for music the drive or partition has to be formatted in either fat32 or ext4 - ext4 works a lot better but most people don't have access to the tools to use it.
 
@sduck, thanks! I think Genre - Artist - ArtistAlbum makes sense. What about the songs? Should each be tagged with Artist, Album, SongNumber and SongName, with the file name be the song title?

I can easily boot into Linux (or better yet PartEd) to format, but the rest of my workflow is Win10 so using FAT32 is the most elegant solution.
 
@sduck, thanks! I think Genre - Artist - ArtistAlbum makes sense.
I assume you mean the folders - that'll work, it doesn't really matter. I use folder view to access the files, so I try to keep it simple.
What about the songs? Should each be tagged with Artist, Album, SongNumber and SongName, with the file name be the song title?
I'm not sure exactly what is required for the system to read and sort the files properly. What I do, that works, is have the file name be "tracknumber - trackname", and have as much of the tags filled out internally as I can - within reason of course. And of course the embedded album art. I've been using digital music files for over 20 years, and have learned that one goes through many ways of playing these things, so try to make it complete and portable.
I can easily boot into Linux (or better yet PartEd) to format, but the rest of my workflow is Win10 so using FAT32 is the most elegant solution.
Remember that you'll need a device that can read and write to ext4 to put the files on, and manage them later, so sticking to fat32 is the best option in most cases.
 
I think you're correct. I guess it depends on how you use the system - I use folder view, and view what's on my drive as albums. That depends on having your music in folders labeled as I mentioned above. But there's other ways of using the thing - you can just throw all your files onto the drive, no folders, and let the system sort things out via the tags, and use the other sorting methods to find your music (I think, haven't tried this).
 
I'd really like to be able to play continuously, to save having to select new albums while driving. My other car (a GM Insignia) continues where it last payed, which is perfect.
If the system MUST stop at the end of an album, then at least the "Back" button could go back to the scroll position it was chosen from.

It's no help to go to "Songs", as I don't want to hear all the Adagios followed by all the Allegro movements!

Does anyone know a way round this? I don't mind changing attributes on the files on the USB stick if that's the only way to achieve it.
 
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It's no help to go to "Songs", as I don't want to hear all the Adagios followed by all the Allegro movements!

Does anyone know a way round this? I don't mind changing attributes on the files on the USB stick if that's the only way to achieve it.

Yes, change the song title tags so a lexical sort will yield the desired playback order, e.g. "<symphony> <track #> <movement title>":

Beethoven's 9th 01 Allegro Ma Non Troppo, Un Poco Maestoso Beethoven's 9th 02 Molto Vivace; Presto Beethoven's 9th 03 Adagio Molto E Antabile Beethoven's 9th 04 Presto; Allegro Assai; Recitativo; Allegro Assai ("Ode To Joy")

or shorten the symphony name to a unique concise tag so it won't crowd out the movement titles on the screen:

B9 01 Allegro Ma Non Troppo, Un Poco Maestoso B9 02 Molto Vivace; Presto B9 03 Adagio Molto E Antabile B9 04 Presto; Allegro Assai; Recitativo; Allegro Assai ("Ode To Joy")
 
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Adding what I know here... saw this in the "similar threads" for the USB media album art thread: USB Music - cover art

USB media in the Tesla is still very primitive except for what it's able to play - it can play 24bit/96KHz FLACs, amazingly enough - but its library features are so bad that you'd expect more functionality in 2001, not 2021.

It only listens to the Artist, Album, TrackNumber, Genre, and Title fields. Everything else, including AlbumArtist and AlbumArt fields, are currently ignored. AlbumArt used to work (see thread above) but was broken with an update.

File names aren't given any attention at all, unless you browse by Folder view on the screen. All files in one folder, perfectly fine, it'll still sort by artist/album.

Albums are grouped by what album matches the same Artist name first, Album name second. So if an album has some tracks saying the artist is "Feat." someone, it'll put that track alone in a different album with the same album name. It's kind of a mess that way.

I use Tag&Rename - a pretty old piece of software I've used for ... probably well over a decade now, on and off - to structure my file tags. For compilations, I'd make the Artist and Album name all the same, and put the song's actual "Artist - Title" right into the Title field. To get there, I'd write the filenames that way first, then "tag from filename" into the Title field.

Generally, for Bandcamp, I just unzip the FLAC .zip directly onto the drive into a folder for the album, and be done with it. No tag or name tweaking needed.

Oh, and as for formatting! You can use exFAT now as well (for dashcam and music) after a recent update, and dual partitioning is awesome. The dashcam partition just needs a folder called "TeslaCam" (it might be case sensitive - it's not normally all caps but it could work...?), and it'll use that partition for cam. I've been perfectly fine with a 32gb dashcam partition for a couple years now.
 
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A fair amount of Tesla's, ahem, unique interpretation of music tags can be found be reading the documentation for TeslaTags. GitHub - Jehoel/TeslaTags: Automatically re-tag MP3 and FLAC files for USB sticks for Tesla Model S, X and 3 cars' music libraries. I encourage you to read that to better understand some of how things are messed up, regardless of whether you choose to use it. I'm not using TeslaTags, instead I took this as an opportunity to play with python libraries for manipulating metadata so that I could do this myself (and my bigger goal is to chase down tagging inconsistencies in my master library, regardless of tesla's quircks).

My main takeaway is that if you think in terms of "albums" then you'll want to replace the "artist" tags on songs with "albumartist".

A couple of other things I have learned learned:

When sorting songs in an album, the "disc" tag is ignored and the filename is ignored. If you have a 2-CD album the Tesla will show two track "1" next to each other, then two track '2", etc. My solution for this is that for multi-track albums I prepend the disc number to the track number tag. In other words, I'll have track numbers 101, 102, 103,... 201, 202, 203. A format string of "%d%02d" is sufficient for me, but then I do not have any "albums" with more than 9 discs, so I can't tell you what it might do when sorting "101" and "1001".

Within an artist folder, I prefer to see albums listed by release date. For example, I want to see "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" before "Abbey Road". So I set the "sortalbum" tag to "1967 Sgt. Peppers..." and "1969 Abbey Road". Tesla, as you would expect by now, completely ignores this. However, it sorts albums by the name of the folder. So while in my main library I have a directory "Beatles, The" with subdirectory "Sgt. Peppers...", on the Tesla this needs to be ".../Beatles, The/1967 Sgt. Pepper's...".

Mentioned elsewhere is the suggestion of changing the top level folder name to give the car a hint about reindexing. So whenever I have modified my Tesla music library I have changed the top level directory name from "Music1" to "Music2", ... etc. To be honest I don't know how beneficial that is, it's just something I have always done although it may be just an urban legend.
 
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Another observation about albums: while folder name is used for sorting, it does seem to group tracks into an album by the "album" tag. I have two copies of Dark Side of the Moon, one in a directory "Dark Side of the Moon [MFSL]" and the other ""Dark Side of the Moon [30th]", but they both had their album tag set to "Dark Side of the Moon". In the car I see one album "Dark Side of the Moon" that has 20 tracks in it, instead of two albums with 10 tracks each.

My guess is that it's grouping tracks into albums by looking that the "album" tag (or maybe both "artist" and "album"), but that it sorts albums within an artist by using the path from one of the tracks.
 
I'm a new M3 owner and this is all very disappointing. Tesla, you can (and should) do better!!
I've kept saying to friends that buying a Tesla is more like buying a cell phone with wheels... It seems I might be wrong. Like with all cars I've come across they can never provide the simplicity and easy of use as just my phone. I'm now on the hunt for a good magnetic cell phone holder to mount next to the screen to play my music off. I'm guessing any road noise will counter the loss of quality heard....
 
I am simultaneously completely amazed and deeply saddened by the Herculean efforts I see in this thread for working around Tesla’s truly pathetic implementation of an MP3 player. They should hire you guys to get this ridiculousness fixed once and for all.
Album art is back with latest update!! Still a hugely inferior player, it art makes me so happy!!