(Another comment about) Album art for music from a memory stick

From my 3 year experience of using it and 50,000 song collection, Tesla simply uses the metadata tags for Artist and Album to look up album art on a server somewhere (I have no idea which service they use but would like to know!). It uses the cellular connection or WiFi if you are connected. If it can't find the album but does find the artist it displays a generic picture of the artist. Once it finds the album art on a remote server it stores it somewhere in RAM so it doesn't have to keep looking it up. If you reboot your Tesla, you loose your album art.

The only time it shows album art in the list is when it sorts by album. When it sorts by artist, it shows the album after the artist in the list. When you list by folder, it doesn't show the album art until you play the song. This is because it is listing songs, not albums.

If you want to preload all the album art when on a good internet connection, simply sort by album and start scrolling down until it obtains all of the album art. The ones that are missing are simply named in a way that the server doesn't like or it is obscure and not available (rare). Personally, I force my artist and album names to mostly match with the iTunes store name so I'm therefore able to use iTunes album art on my computer.

It is best if you review your workflow so the ripped mp3's have the correct metadata so your Tesla knows what to look up. Also realize that any album art embedded in the file is completely ignored and you must wait for the Tesla to decide when it wants do download the album art (sometimes it is very delayed). For a small collection just use your WiFi connection for the best speed.

The album art works fine for me in album mode. For some reason no album art shows up in folder mode. Go figure.

David29 said:

A follow-up question, if I may: There are two data fields for artist: One is the artist, and one is the album artist. Do you know which Tesla uses? I was planning to do a test but perhaps someone has discovered this detail. (One reason I ask is to decide what to use with compilations or mixes -- whether to use one artist for all the songs, or use the individual; artist on each song, etc. I see that if I use a separate artist for each song, Tesla seems to treat teach combination of artist name and album title as a separate album, rather than as one album with "various artists."

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Tesla does not recognize "Album Artist" for sure. Only "Artist" and I was specific when I used that term for that reason. If you are using a Mac, there is an EXCELLENT application called "TeslaTunes" that will convert your iTunes collection or playlist and embed the "Artist" tag into the song name and substitute the "Album Artist" as the "Artist." This is very helpful with an extremely large collection with many compiiation albums. You can use "Various Artists" as the Album Artist and then when you view by Artist, it shows up as a complete album, not split up with each artist individually and not littering your Artist view with a bunch of single song artists. The main reason for this App is that it converts Apple Lossless (ALAC) into FLAC files that Tesla can read.

Tesla Tunes by tattwamasi

Also, I'd like to verify, with the folder view you do not see any album art until you play the song. It just shows the folders.

Every time I take my USB thumb drive out to add new music, which is pretty much a few times a week, or whenever I reboot the center console, it downloads the artwork all over again. Much of it is not the correct artwork. I have all the artwork in each album which my iOS devices and MP3 players on my Androids all pick up. It makes no sense that Tesla would ignore this and incur all the extra data usage to download artwork for albums that already have it included.

ITSELE said:

Tesla simply uses the metadata tags for Artist and Album to look up album art on a server somewhere (I have no idea which service they use but would like to know!).

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The conventional wisdom, confirmed by my own experience is that Tesla uses Gracenote for the album art.

Andyw2100 said:

The conventional wisdom, confirmed by my own experience is that Tesla uses Gracenote for the album art.

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Andy...You are so right. Thank You!

Tesla | Gracenote

One more piece of the puzzle.

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sorka said:

Every time I take my USB thumb drive out to add new music, which is pretty much a few times a week, or whenever I reboot the center console, it downloads the artwork all over again. Much of it is not the correct artwork. I have all the artwork in each album which my iOS devices and MP3 players on my Androids all pick up. It makes no sense that Tesla would ignore this and incur all the extra data usage to download artwork for albums that already have it included.

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You are correct. Embedded artwork is ignored and simply using the Artist and Album info Tesla downloads artwork from Gracenote. You could cross reference how you are naming your albums to be sure it matches up. I'm not sure how to do that yet but just knowing where it is getting data from helps. I'm discovering now that iTunes uses Gracenote for some of it's technology and I'm pretty good at naming albums the same as named in iTunes Store so maybe that is why I'm having better luck matching Album Art.

I think Tesla programmers were thinking it is much cleaner to the Tesla interface for it to download the smallest DPI necessary for album artwork then trying to force a 600 x 600 or even greater picture file into the interface when it's not needed. It could also be one more place for hackers to do damage (I'm guessing). Personally I agree with you. Many of my music files have special Album Art that isn't available on Gracenote/iTunes that I would like to see.

I'm also an owner disappointed with the problematic USB player... While waiting to take delivery, I went through hours of work to discover what Tesla supported in terms of formats and bitrates since this isn't documented in the MS Owner's Manual like every other brand auto I've owned does, and trying to decide how I wanted to handle having both a few of my favorite full-albums and many more "playlists" available on a single USB stick without M3U playlist support. As most of us know, there is no really good solution with that, only workarounds duplicating tracks between subfolders which lead to other challenges. Then, after taking delivery, I found the issues with USB album art, and while I also have album art attached to each of my tracks which are successfully displayed by every other device my iTunes library is a part of and even different Macs or PC -- no go with my otherwise-technologically-advanced Tesla. Always staring at an overly large grey note symbol where album art should be on my 17" or IC, with only a track title, but no album or artist name as I get with FM, just reminds me of this lack of attention-to-detail every time I drive my MS.

IMHO USB Media Player Support is an example of a function (like Nav) that was made available with just enough capability to get MS into the market -- in this case as Tesla's answer for MS having no physical CD/DVD or iPod/iPhone/MP3 player connectivity -- but what is provided is far from being refined or as fully-functional as I had in my older Lexus and MBZ which my MS replaced. Personally, I hope USB Media Player gets enhanced sooner than later for owners like us that care about listening to our own audio, along with fixing the USB bug where it plays itself when your car is parked even if you remember to pause play before locking the doors. The latter is acknowledged as a firmware problem without an ETA for resolution, but it's frustrating loosing your place in a long track like a podcast when you park, as well as loosing 2-3+ miles of additional range each day when I don't remember to switch to another audio source or unplug my USB stick every time I park (and then waiting several minutes for 140GB of music to be scanned when I next get into my MS so I can listen to my own audio again). {:| This may not be a big deal to some, but for me, it's disappointing having to deal with it and be reminded of the problems every time I drive and park my otherwise amazing ride.

Last night I tried this out with my UHFS using FLAC and albums in folders using a folder.jpg file for the artwork in each folder. As reported I say the thumbnail when sorting by album but when tracks played, nothing.

BTW none of my media files have the embedded image.

Is there any hope that Tesla could/would support the folder.jpg images?

aesculus said:

...Is there any hope that Tesla could/would support the folder.jpg images?

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IMHO there is always hope, but I'm not holding my breath. Hate to say it, but there are a number of acknowledged bugs to be resolved (I would hope) ahead of new features.

David29 said:

I know there have been a lot of comments in various threads about the issues with album art for MP3 music recorded to a memory stick and connected to the USB ports.
But I noticed something yesterday that I do not recall reading.
I was trying out a memory stick with only a few albums on it. All of these had been ripped from CDs, and I had to add or edit the metadata (tags) because the data did not survive the ripping process for one reason or another. I had edited the data with some new software (mp3tag) and wanted to see if I was successful.
If I accessed the music by genre or by album or artist, I could see the album art (whether or not it was the correct art is, of course, a separate issue).
But if I chose the music by starting with the folder and working down, I saw no album art.
Has anyone else experienced this? And does anyone have any idea why this would be the case? I am not quite clear on what fields in the data are used by Tesla to obtain the album art.....

Just realized I posted this in the WRONG CATEGORY -- this should be in the User Interface category. So if someone could move this, I'd appreciate it!

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My experience is the same. If I choose music from an album the art displays. If I choose it from a folder, nada.