Work around for albums being Split on USB Flash Drive Music

[mswlogo]

This isn't the first time I've had to "tweak" my music library for a new car or Radio.
I have about 10,000 songs 600 albums on a 128gb USB 3.0 Drive.

There is a "bug" in Tesla Model 3 that splits Albums if the Artist Tag is different between tracks within an Album.

I have lots of "compilation" disks from various artists (Movie Sound tracks are often like this). And it's pretty much unusable to browse anything with a few dozen albums split like this. I only had 600 albums but it was parsing it as several thousand albums with the same album repeated with 1 track in each.

So I applied a work around to fix it.

Most rippers will set the "AlbumArtist" Tag. If the Artist is the same on each Track they are often the same name.
If the Artist varies it will be often the person, record label or something that is responsible for putting that Album together.

So I used a tool to set the Artist Tag on every track to the value of "Album Artist" Tag. To make the Artist Tag the same value for every track within an Album.

Before doing this you should verify how many albums have "Album Artist" not set.

To do both things I used an free tool called Mp3Tag Mp3tag - the universal Tag Editor (ID3v2, MP4, OGG, FLAC, ...) very powerful tool.

To check your "Album Artist" do the following.
File -> Change Directory -> Browse to your USB Flash Drive Root.

Now Click on the "Album Artist" Colum Heading to sort it. Notice the top album is blank.

Select those rows. Then on the Left Fill in the Album Artist. Then Click the Floppy Disk Icon at the top left tool bar.

It will look like this. Keep clicking the Album Artist heading a couple times and make sure no blank ones sort to the top.

The Steps above can be done on your Main Library if you want (after practicing on a Copy).
The Steps below should only be done on the USB Flash Drive, which I hope is a Copy of your library.

This a temporary work around for a bug. I won't hold my breath until this gets fixed.

Now your ready for the work around. Select Every Track. Click on a single track then hit CTRL-A

Now click Actions -> Actions (Quick)

Select Format Value and click Ok.

Click the Drop Down on Field and choose ARTIST. Click the Right Arrow on format string and choose albumartist. Then click ok.

This will run a while depending on speed of your USB Drive and size of library. You do not have to click Save after, it's already done.

Also note, I was using an old 3rd party tool to format FAT32 USB Drive above 32gb. I've used it for years but not this size. My Jeep does NTFS (hint hint Tesla FAT32 was dead 8 years ago). Anyway it works but the folder names were coming up corrupt in the Model 3 and other issues.

I ended up formatting my USB Flash Drive on Mac OS and it worked great after that.

I used a brand new tool from dbpoweramp called TuneFusion (Free Beta) to build my "Car Library" (MP3/320) from my master library (FLAC, SACD, AC3, MP4, MP3 and a bunch of others). I might write a tutorial on that to if anyone is interested.

I highly recommend a USB 3.0 Flash Drive to make things less painful in creating and tweaking your Flash Drive.

Please, I don't want to hear from the FLAC purists about how horrible MP3 is. This work around applies to any format.

 

[lairdb]

Unfortunately, for all its power, MP3Tag does not have a command line interface that would allow for automating this.

id3mtag looks promising, but I haven't tried yet.

IDTE- ID3 Tag Editor looks like a fork/knockoff of MP3Tag, and may offer a command line (SourceForge has an angry fruit salad UI in which I can't find clear documentation.)

 

[mswlogo]

Actually TuneFusion should be able to do it as well with just a tweak. I suggested it in the Beta discussion. However TuneFusion is GUI only too. I forget if it’s Windows only too.

Mp3Tag is so fast and easy it’s not a big deal there is no comnand line for it, for me.

There is many ways this can be done.

I was just pointing out the flaw in the model 3 database builder and how I dealt with it.

Model 3 USB is now working great.

If you have suggestions of other tools you use I’m all ears.

 

[lairdb]

Yeah, my idle unimplemented thoughts ran along the lines of an automated process where plugging in the drive* to the computer led to:
- update USB drive with new/different playlist/library content
- mangle USB drive tags to suit Tesla media engine

...all hands-off other than plugging in the drive.

(*And if it was a wirelessly accessible drive, skip the plugging in part, and just have it update when in-range, nightly, etc.)

 

[mswlogo]

Yeah, my idle unimplemented thoughts ran along the lines of an automated process where plugging in the drive* to the computer led to:
- update USB drive with new/different playlist/library content
- mangle USB drive tags to suit Tesla media engine

...all hands-off other than plugging in the drive.

(*And if it was a wirelessly accessible drive, skip the plugging in part, and just have it update when in-range, nightly, etc.)

Yeah that would be nice. TuneFusion will automatically sync and convert a USB Stick When plugged in.
But it is Beta. It was very close to do everything.

By the way what I use that tool for is my library is mixed. Mostly CD's ripped to FLAC. But I have MP3's too when albums are out of print or just not available, and I have some SACD rips too. I don't want to blindly Decode and Re-Encode. With TuneFusion I can selectively Re-Encode Flacs to MP3 for the car but will know to just Copy MP3's (so as not to degrade them further). It worked perfect for this.

FLACS for the car get to expensive to maintain for extremely little gain. I maintain 2 phones and 2 cars with the same process.
All flac would be like 300gB on all devices.

TuneFusion also has the capability of running plug-ins, like Volume Normalization, etc. It has a plugin processor for editing Tags as well.
But it's available "macros" are fairly limited. He just needs to add a macro for copying albumartist to artist. And it will do everything when I just pop the USB Stick in.

Using Mp3Tag is just a stop gap. But it's been a great tool over the years. It was also easy to show folks here visually what was going on.

 

[aesculus]

So I applied a work around to fix it.

Thanks for reminding me about this. After 2 years I have given up on Tesla to ever fix it. Christmas is coming up soon and that is my biggest use of compilation albums so I am going to bite the bullet and do this.

You can use any artist name you want. So for example I have a Best of James Bond album with all sorts of artists that Tesla treats as separate albums. The artist for that album on my USB is now James Bond and everything plays within one album and in the correct order now.

Hint: When you make a change to the USB drive you will need to modify the name of the root folder the music is in so it will force a rescan of the USB drive.

 

[Stach]

Well, I unfortunately have been suffering with this largish audio bug as well and finally decided to search for an answer. I really appreciate all of the effort that went into this post, but Tesla really needs to fix this glaring bug. There are several audio player bugs in the latest versions of firmware and Tesla seems to have no interest in cleaning anything up, only releasing new features unfortunately. I understand that they need to have new features to make money, but they could really use a major bug fix release at this point, ala Apple.

Thanks again for getting to the root of this issue and providing a work around.

 

[aesculus]

There may be a glimmer of hope here but don't get your hopes up yet.

Comprehensive USB Bug List

 

[Buttybach]

I too worked through this problem and eventually realised that I could either have albums nicely sorted as per this thread OR, as I have many compilation albums for both classical and contemporary music, I could get the artist split - but I could not get both. Making all artists the same sorted the albums out but lost the artist in the song title appearing during playing and lost the opportunity to select all songs by one artist.

I eventually worked out that, if I organised my files by album I could have both. Then the FILES sort is equivalent to an album sort. This way the artists are left intact and you just have to ignore the ALBUM sort which is now not needed.

It also helps to assign your own GENRES to each album (overwrite the ones that come with the album) as this gives a means to split music into each type and then you can, say, random play through all your tracks for one type of music.

So album sorting is not really needed...

 

[aesculus]

Making all artists the same sorted the albums out but lost the artist in the song title appearing during playing and lost the opportunity to select all songs by one artist.

I am not sure what you mean by "Making all artists the same" but in my case for each album I just have a single artist. For some compilation albums I picked the most predominant one and others I assigned a generic artist. In both cases I still see the artist in the playback and I can still play all the songs for that artist too.

All my tracks are filed by root>music>artist>album

 

[tomstephens89]

Sorting by Album Artist is still a missing feature from Tesla's even in mid 2023.

So the only solution is as the OP states, to make sure the ARTIST tag is the same for every album track.

 

[dotheDVDeed]

Yep. Still on-going in 2024. I have fan-made compilations of the Billboard Top 100 hits for years 1966-1978. You can imagine what a mess this is looking at the album view with each artist listed as a separate album.