USB Music Not Working

[khoon]

I took delivery of my Model 3 on Sept 7th and tried to connect a USB thumb drive to the 2 front USB ports but discovered that it took a very long time (~10 mins) for the USB drive to be recognized. I was able to access my music and play it but after I stopped the car and went back in the USB drive was not showing up anymore! Made several attempts to disconnect it and reinstall it. At times it would show up again on the center screen, more often it would not and seems very erratic. I showed the issue to the delivery center folks and they acknowledged that it was a software bug in the car that would need to be fixed. I'm wondering if others have encountered this issue as well and if there's a fix for it?
Thanks.

 

[Skidmark]

Try using a different brand/model USB drive. I haven't had great performance with a Sandisk USB 3.0 cruzer fit, but the USB 2.0 cruzer fit works all the time.

 

[khoon]

Thanks Skidmark. I am using a SanDisk 256GB Ultra Fit USB 3.1 Flash Drive. Will try another drive and see if that works.

 

[Skidmark]

You could be hitting a size limitation as well. I would try something <32GB

 

[Tam]

...long time (~10 mins)...

I too use 256GB formatted in fat32 and Tesla takes a long time to index my thousands of songs.

It's much faster if I use a smaller capacity such as 32GB.

I consider this as a normal and expected behavior.

 

[khoon]

Thanks again Skidmark and Tam! My music collection is about 121GB and I'm wondering if I should use a drive (other than SanDisk) that is 128GB? Understand that the larger the drive, the more time it'll take it to load the content but my issue is that most times the 256 GB Sandisk drive is not recognized and if after several attempts it is recognized, the car mysteriously drops it after a while.

 

[Tam]

...256 GB...

Just to make sure: Did you manually format ALL your thumb drives in fat32 format for Tesla?

 

[khoon]

Didn't do it manually. I'm using an Apple Mac and I used disk Utility to check the USB drive - it says the format is MS-DOS (FAT32)

 

[m3snowy]

I'm having the same problem; car is on v34.1. Have tried a 8GB USB thumb drive that was working fine in my previous car, and a 16GB SanDisk microSD card (was using it for camera) with a single-slot USB adapter.

Additional problems I've are:

• The car would not notice that I've swapped USB drives. It took a double-scroll-wheel reset to get it to scan a new drive I've plugged in.
• At one point the USB screen showed 3 USB devices (when the car only has 2 USB plugs for songs) and was playing songs from the 3rd one.
• Some songs on USB would fail to play (loading error), but then the next time I start the car the same songs would be playable, whereas other songs that were fine before would fail to play.
• Songs on USB / Tune-in / even Navigation voice prompt would skip (1/4 second of silence) periodically for no reason.

 

[sduck]

I have tried several usb drives in the model 3 - they work pretty much equally poorly. The current USB audio system just isn't up to par, compared to virtually any other car on the market with similar features. Hopefully this will get fixed soon, but don't hold your breath. Currently I have a 128gb usb 3.0 drive in there, it works as well as anything, takes about a minute to maybe 3 minutes to load everything. It almost never remembers where I was through power cycles, which is a deal killer for me. I also have 64gb usb 3.1 drive which loads slightly faster, and works the same otherwise. I also have a 64gb usb 2 drive, which works about the same, just takes longer to load.

There's no real tricks or tips to get it to work better or reliably. Please use the Ask A Question form in your account>manage page and report these problems. If enough people do this, especially after each software upgrade where it's NOT fixed, maybe eventually it'll get fixed.

 

[khoon]

Thanks Snowy, seems like I'm not the only one having issues. BTW, how can I check on the SW version in my car? In my case, in the remote cases that it recognizes the drive, the songs play fine. I am trying to reformat and reinstall my USB flash drive hope it works (fingers crossed) - if not, I'm going o buy a PNY or any brand drive other than a SanDisk.

 

[Tam]

...Apple Mac...

You did well with FAT32 format.

The next thing is: Is it because of music format? I use FLAC files. What do you use: mp3, wav, aac, aiff...?

 

[m3snowy]

Thanks Snowy, seems like I'm not the only one having issues. BTW, how can I check on the SW version in my car?

It's in your mobile phone app at the bottom below your VIN.

 

[Austindude]

My cheap 32G Lexar usb 3.0 stick (I used the default formatting, didn't change anything) and it worked fine in my Model 3. Now if I just had more music in the MP3 format.

 

[khoon]

Thanks again Tam & Snowy! I'm using MP3 had to convert the entire music library from AAC to MP3. Snowy, got it - I'm still discovering and learning....mine says 3.4.1 - guess thats the most current release?

 

[gbrgbr]

usb audio has worked perfectly for me:
- using only mp3s (i've not tried other formats)
- after removing all but id3 tags from my mp3s
- after remembering to hit pause when I get out (it then remembers where I was)
- after accepting for now that there is no shuffle mode, the only thing lacking

 

[khoon]

Tried with another SanDisk 256GB drive - same issues. I'm quite certain there's no correlation to the music format because after I stop the car and get out - get back in and start the car again, and the USB is gone!

Gbrgbr, thank for your comments. Would you mind sharing the details of your car's SW version, and the USB drive's details, i.e. brand size etc? Perhaps SanDisk is incompatible with Tesla (although I find that hard to believe).

 

[gbrgbr]

amazon link: SanDisk 16GB Ultra Fit USB 3.1 Flash Drive - SDCZ430-016G-G46

I've had my tm3 since late June with 3 software updates since then. my comments apply to all 4 versions i've had, ie no problems once I used mp3tag to remove the non-id3 tags I found in mp3s. I forget what the other tags are called - something starting with "A" if I recall correctly. look for a TMC thread titled "YAUT...."

there are about 2000 songs on this usb drive and the information loaded within seconds each time I plugged it in. I generally pick "Songs," start somewhere randomly in the song list, and move through in alphabetical order.

my latest discovery is that if I pause the song currently playing when i'm getting out of the car, it will still be there when I get back and I can resume it or move to the next song in alphabetical order.

 

[GPinzone]

- after remembering to hit pause when I get out (it then remembers where I was)
- after accepting for now that there is no shuffle mode, the only thing lacking

I gotta try the pause idea. I posted a way to get shuffle or choose a play order by modifying the song ID3 titles.

 

[Commish]

Holy crap, this thread surprised the hell out of me. I had no idea you could use those USB ports to play music, I thought it was all Bluetooth based! Finally I can stop fooling around with TuneIn to make all my playlists...