USB music

[dsandhu]

While I’m waiting on my Y I was wondering if I should order a larger usb drive for music (I know the Y comes with a small one). Is it user friendly? I have had vehicles in the past that were super user unfriendly to play music files. Lot of times it’s very cumbersome to navigate directories, very slow interfaces, and search that barely worked. Is it any better on Teslas? Also, does Sentry keep longer footage depending on how much storage space is available? Saw somewhere that recordings are limited to so many hours regardless how big the attached usb drive is.

 

[EVRider-FL]

The USB that comes with the car is meant for dashcam and Sentry Mode use. You can’t use it for music unless you create a second partition on the USB, which isn’t worth doing in my opinion. Buy a second USB large enough to hold your music and use them both. If you’re unhappy with how that functions, you can stream music from your phone via Bluetooth.

Sentry Mode uses whatever space is available, and if you use a 128+ GB drive for video, you probably won’t have to free up space often unless you explicitly save a lot of video. I don’t recall how large the USB is that comes with the car.

 

[Twiglett]

there are a number of threads dedicated to setting up music on a USB shared with dashcam
Search is your friend

 

[dsandhu]

I guess I wasn’t clear. My question about usb music feature basically is that is it useable/user friendly enough for me to buy a usb drive? I know how to partition hard drives and properly name folders. I know how to follow instructions readily available on the web. I’m asking about personal human user experience from existing owners.

In many cars, from my past experience, it’s usually very cumbersome and not worth messing with and wasting my time adding additional storage.

 

[Transformer]

It is definitely worthwhile. The UI is responsive although it does (currently) take several precise taps with eyes off the road to access a particular song or album.

Voice input won't (currently) find a song or album from the USB drive or even select a particular audio source. Instead, if you ask to "play USB" or "play FM" or play something on your USB drive it will play some weird thing from the internet, which is good for variety, at least.

 

[MrBadger]

For the sake of a few minutes, probably worth putting a couple of albums on any old USB device and giving it a try - that will quickly give a feel as to whether it suits. It won't be significantly slower (if at all) if you then decide to do it properly. We use two media cards, one for TeslaCam and one for audio, so TeslaCam and Audio are kept separate. We use lossless FLAC on an inexpensive 128GB card - would probably do 256GB if I was doing it again as I had to prune a few albums from my collection to fit.

 

[Twiglett]

I guess I wasn’t clear. My question about usb music feature basically is that is it useable/user friendly enough for me to buy a usb drive? I know how to partition hard drives and properly name folders. I know how to follow instructions readily available on the web. I’m asking about personal human user experience from existing owners.

In many cars, from my past experience, it’s usually very cumbersome and not worth messing with and wasting my time adding additional storage.

that's why I said search is your friend. The USB music hasn't really changed for a very long time, so reading posts from this past year or so will show you what folks have experienced so far. Lots and lots of "personal human user experience" there for the reading.

 

[sduck]

I use usb music all the time. It works quite well, except for some big obvious problems that you have to work around. The biggest bugaboo is that it doesn't reliably remember where it was playing when you get back in the car the next day - there are several ways to alleviate this, the most successful is waking the car up with your phone before getting in it in the morning or whenever. There are some other things - search doesn't really work, favorites don't save, playlists don't work, but I don't care about those the way I use it. While the system used to display album art (embedded in the file tags) when playing usb files, that's been broken since November of last year, and who knows when or if they're going to fix it.

Playing flac files through this sound system sounds great - it's the best sound you're going to get from this car, if you care about this.

 

[EVRider-FL]

USB drives are inexpensive. Just try it for yourself. Your satisfaction will depend in part on which features you use.

 

[dsandhu]

I use usb music all the time. It works quite well, except for some big obvious problems that you have to work around. The biggest bugaboo is that it doesn't reliably remember where it was playing when you get back in the car the next day - there are several ways to alleviate this, the most successful is waking the car up with your phone before getting in it in the morning or whenever. There are some other things - search doesn't really work, favorites don't save, playlists don't work, but I don't care about those the way I use it. While the system used to display album art (embedded in the file tags) when playing usb files, that's been broken since November of last year, and who knows when or if they're going to fix it.

Playing flac files through this sound system sounds great - it's the best sound you're going to get from this car, if you care about this.

Thank you! My main reason for wanting to play usb over streaming or Bluetooth is flac/wav.

 

[Transformer]

... search doesn't really work, favorites don't save, playlists don't work ...

Does music search ever look on the USB drive? Even preselecting USB audio then using the "Any music" magnifying glass icon or the voice command "Play <an exact song title on USB>" seems to only look on Slacker Streaming.

How to enter playlists (even if they're currently broken)?

 

[Tez~La]

Oh Yeah no album artwork from USB music.

 

[sduck]

How to enter playlists (even if they're currently broken)?

The only way currently is an annoying workaround - create a separate folder with the tracks you would have in your playlist. Takes up lots of unnecessary space, but that's how you've got to do it currently.

 

[AmunRa51]

my MY was giving usb error( I have >1000 songs). Trick I learnt is to put on radio, then insert the usb and let Tesla read it(give it 5-10 min) before you click on usb icon. if you try before Tesla reads all file , it will get hung and error out.

 

[idriveacar]

I recommend keeping music and dashcam on separate drives. For music, I use a tiny PNY 512GB flash drive, and for dashcam I use a more robust (and physically large) Samsung 500GB USB SSD. My thought process is that the music drive is written to very rarely, whereas the dashcam drive is written to constantly. The SSD is going to be designed to be more durable.

Remember that flash storage can only be written to so many times before degrading; so the quality of the drive is important if you write constantly.

 

[techlogik]

For a few that said favorites don't work on USB, it does on mine. But, the trick is, add the song on USB to Favorites. You need to click off into streaming/phone as another audio source, then go back to USB and favorites list, and the songs are there now. It just doesn't seem to update dynamically. I have like 150-200 songs on the favorites.

But many annoying things for sure, like, when you select a folder, why can't you just select play/shuffle the entire folder/subfolders by default? Isn't even an option to play once you are on the folder level, you have to go into the folder then it will play the songs. This is 101 programming, some kid in college taking courses can figure this out...gheez.

 

[Merrill]

Yes, even I could fix it. Album art so you can pick you artist or album by just clicking on the album art rather than taking your eyes off the road and hit USB, artist or album and then the song. Does not seem to be important to the powers that be at Tesla.

 

[techlogik]

^Hate going off topic some but this is why Tesla has 5000 job openings. Host of problems and they use their AI summit to recruit people. Any other company that has it together gets issues like this resolved. Elon doesn’t give a rats ass.

 

[mjwojtukiewicz]

I have attached pictures from my phone and computer. I have a bunch of MP3 albums with each folder being the artist and the albums within the folder

I have 1 Beatles in my computer but get multiple lines in display. When I list all the songs look at all the Joan Jett songs Lastly is a picture of my windows

directory. Do I need some fixup tool? Is the MCU running Linux?

 

[Transformer]

The car organizes USB music by the audio tags rather than the folder and file names -- except in folder view.

It only uses the Album, Artist, TrackNumber, Genre, and Title fields.

It sorts and groups songs by the combination of the Artist + Album fields. So to make a collection or other album show up as a single album, all of its songs must have the same Artist and Album fields. (You can put the varying artist names in the song titles.)

More info in other threads like USB music - folder structure? "Embedded" cover art?