Comprehensive USB Bug List

[BertL]

On another subject, first HAPPY NEW YEAR to fellow TMC Members living life with our Tesla Media Player and USB implementation.

It's a new year with all the hopes and dreams, and wanting to start some things fresh that entails. I had not driven my MS in a couple days and it's been off-charger with still 200+ miles of Rated Range left. No problem. Got in earlier this morning, and whammo -- no USB music. Yup, it had just started rescanning. Sigh. Switched to FM for a while until rescan completed, and was listening to USB when I arrived at my first destination. Got back into my MS 40 mins later, and whammo -- no USB music again. Yup, rescanning again. Switched to FM for a while, and then it went silent (on the same road I had just traveled in the other direction with FM). Changed stations. Same silence. Rebooted the CID while driving. FM came on quickly enough and rescan started over (as I would have expected). Switched to USB when rescan was complete, exiting my MS at my 2nd destination. Was back within 10 minutes, and this time had USB music immediately when I opened the door. How pleasant. 2 fails out of 3 to begin my new year. Ah, my first sanity check that some things don't change just because the clock rolled over, but who knows, there may be great improvements with the delayed 8.1 when that arrives.

 

[aesculus]

I used mine yesterday and today with a number of start/stops over about 7 hours of driving. Never had it rescan after the initial one where I inserted the drive after a bit of tagging adjustments.

Biggest frustration for me is still the retro grading of compilation albums.

 

[supratachophobia]

Take a gander upthread for detail. I removed excess tags. You're welcome to try all tags, just understanding of course that I for one would have no expectation of things working well in any view that is dependent upon them... and in some former code drops also discussed previously, as odd as it was, Folder View was still using some of that tag data (even though I for one do not believe it ever should except for perhaps the actual display of track info when playing back a single track in folder view.) Please do go ahead and do your tests... results vary from release-to-release, so have fun!

Have we possibly considered a problem in v1 vs. v2 ID3 tags? I know we should have crossed that barrier a long time ago, but MP3's can still hold both according to Winamp. And the Media Player may not be aware of how to handle both or pick one.

 

[BertL]

Have we possibly considered a problem in v1 vs. v2 ID3 tags? I know we should have crossed that barrier a long time ago, but MP3's can still hold both according to Winamp. And the Media Player may not be aware of how to handle both or pick one.

Perhaps, but it would take a lot of work to try and figure that out... more than at least yours truly is willing to consider, as I'm not so sure it's as easy as deleting tags and art that were not just part of the ID3v1 spec. I've never had to, nor do I want to go that far in my knowledge.

IIRC, the fundamental issue with the v1 spec built originally for MP3 was there were limited fields and fixed lengths (but only things Tesla appeared to use early-on in their interface.) Imbedded Album Art, e.g. came in with ID3v2 for that reason, didn't it? IDK 100%. ...but to your point, Tesla could have gotten along fine using the basic tags in the v1 spec until they started using imbedded album art with MP 8.0 if my history is right. Tesla could be doing their own thing to directly access ID3 tag data, but most apps these days use one of a handful of open source libraries to read/write the proper formats and do the heavy lifting. Because of the work involved to build and maintain your own (ID3v2 is complex), only some of the major tools (e.g. iTunes, dBpoweramp) seem to do their own thing when I was researching that a few weeks/months ago... (Tools like Metadatics which I use on my Mac to fiddle with tag data absolutely uses a common generally-available library -- found it digging through their documentation and backtracking a while back when I was researching all our album art issues.) All that to say, Tesla may have either expanded their custom code with 8.0 to get to v2 holders, or maybe they started using a different open-source library to handle that for them with 8.0. Either one could have introduced problems I suppose. Really nothing any of us can easily do to determine that from way out here in Customer/User Land.

 

[Boatguy]

Perhaps, but it would take a lot of work to try and figure that out... more than at least yours truly is willing to consider, as I'm not so sure it's as easy as deleting tags and art that were not just part of the ID3v1 spec. I've never had to, nor do I want to go that far in my knowledge.

IIRC, the fundamental issue with the v1 spec built originally for MP3 was there were limited fields and fixed lengths (but only things Tesla appeared to use early-on in their interface.) Imbedded Album Art, e.g. came in with ID3v2 for that reason, didn't it? IDK 100%. ...but to your point, Tesla could have gotten along fine using the basic tags in the v1 spec until they started using imbedded album art with MP 8.0 if my history is right. Tesla could be doing their own thing to directly access ID3 tag data, but most apps these days use one of a handful of open source libraries to read/write the proper formats and do the heavy lifting. Because of the work involved to build and maintain your own (ID3v2 is complex), only some of the major tools (e.g. iTunes, dBpoweramp) seem to do their own thing when I was researching that a few weeks/months ago... (Tools like Metadatics which I use on my Mac to fiddle with tag data absolutely uses a common generally-available library -- found it digging through their documentation and backtracking a while back when I was researching all our album art issues.) All that to say, Tesla may have either expanded their custom code with 8.0 to get to v2 holders, or maybe they started using a different open-source library to handle that for them with 8.0. Either one could have introduced problems I suppose. Really nothing any of us can easily do to determine that from way out here in Customer/User Land.

Happy New Year!

Wouldn't this all be at least a little bit easier if Tesla published some specifications / requirements for music stored on USB? The only specification I see in the v8 Owner's Manual is:

"Note: Media Player supports USB flash drives with NTFS or FAT32 formatting. (exFAT is not currently supported.)"​

 

[supratachophobia]

Perhaps, but it would take a lot of work to try and figure that out... more than at least yours truly is willing to consider, as I'm not so sure it's as easy as deleting tags and art that were not just part of the ID3v1 spec. I've never had to, nor do I want to go that far in my knowledge.

IIRC, the fundamental issue with the v1 spec built originally for MP3 was there were limited fields and fixed lengths (but only things Tesla appeared to use early-on in their interface.) Imbedded Album Art, e.g. came in with ID3v2 for that reason, didn't it? IDK 100%. ...but to your point, Tesla could have gotten along fine using the basic tags in the v1 spec until they started using imbedded album art with MP 8.0 if my history is right. Tesla could be doing their own thing to directly access ID3 tag data, but most apps these days use one of a handful of open source libraries to read/write the proper formats and do the heavy lifting. Because of the work involved to build and maintain your own (ID3v2 is complex), only some of the major tools (e.g. iTunes, dBpoweramp) seem to do their own thing when I was researching that a few weeks/months ago... (Tools like Metadatics which I use on my Mac to fiddle with tag data absolutely uses a common generally-available library -- found it digging through their documentation and backtracking a while back when I was researching all our album art issues.) All that to say, Tesla may have either expanded their custom code with 8.0 to get to v2 holders, or maybe they started using a different open-source library to handle that for them with 8.0. Either one could have introduced problems I suppose. Really nothing any of us can easily do to determine that from way out here in Customer/User Land.

Again, to my fuzzy knowledge, I think I am in concurrence with you. v2 tags were invented to overcome the limitation of v1 fields. I think the original v1 spec had maybe half a dozen fields, including 2 character track number. v2 takes it all many steps further to include all the goodies you like, such as album artist, embedded art, lyrics, mutli-character track numbering (like "04/10"). As to how it applies to the Tesla, I might play around with this because I think MP3 Tag&Rename has specific options for clearing/copying/writing v1-->v2 and v2-->v1.

If I were Tesla back in 2010, maybe I threw in support for v1, thinking that album art, lyrics, etc. were all totally silly to put in a car media player. And now that they want to support some of those features, it's becoming a challenge.

On a side note, has anyone ever considered or heard the old rumor that the original UI source code was lost to Tesla with the airplane deaths of some of the engineers? And that the last few years have been spent with UI developers trying to recreate their work? I'm just throwing that out there because I felt like putting on my tin foil hat and grasping at straws.

 

[jgs]

Got in earlier this morning, and whammo -- no USB music. Yup, it had just started rescanning.

I was just about to post that since getting 2.50.114, I haven't experienced any gratuitous rescans (long-time fans of this thread may remember that I had never gone more than a few hours without one in any previous 8.0 variant). I was feeling guardedly optimistic until I read your post. Buzz. Killed. (What firmware version are you at?)

By the way, what are Mac people using for big batch transcodes? My library is mostly AIFF and I transcode down to AAC-256 for the car. I was using Max but it's been unmaintained for a long time and doesn't seem to work reliably with recent versions of OS X, so I guess it's time to move.

 

[Boatguy]

By the way, what are Mac people using for big batch transcodes? My library is mostly AIFF and I transcode down to AAC-256 for the car. I was using Max but it's been unmaintained for a long time and doesn't seem to work reliably with recent versions of OS X, so I guess it's time to move.

dbPowerAmp. Funky UI adapted from PC, but very powerful.

Better UI but fewer features is Fission in the Mac App store.

 

[BertL]

Happy New Year!

Wouldn't this all be at least a little bit easier if Tesla published some specifications / requirements for music stored on USB? The only specification I see in the v8 Owner's Manual is:

"Note: Media Player supports USB flash drives with NTFS or FAT32 formatting. (exFAT is not currently supported.)"​

Yup, agree, but I'm sorta past asking for and suggesting the need for improved documentation. It's clearly a very low priority except for what are considered major new functions -- even then, some rather important changes (IMHO) are never noted for even AP in release notes, let alone the actual owner's manual.

 

[BertL]

I was just about to post that since getting 2.50.114, I haven't experienced any gratuitous rescans (long-time fans of this thread may remember that I had never gone more than a few hours without one in any previous 8.0 variant). I was feeling guardedly optimistic until I read your post. Buzz. Killed. (What firmware version are you at?)

By the way, what are Mac people using for big batch transcodes? My library is mostly AIFF and I transcode down to AAC-256 for the car. I was using Max but it's been unmaintained for a long time and doesn't seem to work reliably with recent versions of OS X, so I guess it's time to move.

2.50.114. I too seem to have had less rescans with .40 before the last update, but that's purely anecdotal now that I'm thinking about it, without supporting data to substantiate my POV.

...and another vote for dBpoweramp (thanks to @Boatguy for turning me onto it a few months ago). Once you figure out the quirky UI, it's the most feature rich of any out there, and it's hard to beat their tech support if it's ever required.

 

[Boatguy]

I think we're going to be stuck with this Media Player's "functionality" for a long time. The exec summary is:

- weak s/w development management
- infotainment is very low priority
- underpowered infotainment h/w platform

1) If you stand back and look at Tesla, their software development is totally out of control. "Control" meaning they have no ability to deliver the specified s/w product on a schedule, even a schedule that they are allowed to revise multiple times. It happened with the MX Falcon doors (the h/w worked, the s/w that controlled them properly came out six months later), the MS/MX infotainment s/w for which they've essentially quit making any promises at all, AP 2.0 s/w, etc. This is symptomatic of very weak and/or disorganized management, I'm not blaming the engineers.

2) Tesla could not have ever planned to ship AP2.0 h/w without any s/w to support it; that is just a crazy scenario for any company. The h/w and mfg engineers executed and shipped a product in early Q4 but the s/w team did not; Falcon doors deja vu. Tesla had to tell customers that they should buy a car with less functionality today than its predecessor, on the promise that it would be ready by December. December came and went with no AP 2.0 s/w. So the AP 2.0 schedule had been changed twice, and they still missed it.

AP 2.0 s/w is priority #1 and it sounds like they are going to be lucky to deliver the s/w that will make it fully functional (feature parity with AP 1.0 but presumably better performance) by the end of the Q1, meaning it will be two quarters behind the h/w.

2) Tesla is still promising they'll ship the M3 by "late 2017". By now we all know that means having a photo op with one customer on 12/31/17; exactly what Chevy did with the Bolt. Software for the M3 has to be priority #2 and since the car is significantly different than the MS/MX, there is a lot of work to be done by a software organization that is not well managed and probably has had some resources redirected to work on AP 2.0.

Once they ship the minimally functional M3 to meet the deadline, they'll be scrambling to fill in the gaps during most of 2018, just as they did with the MX and AP 2.0.

3) Media Player? Navigation route planning? Favorite contacts in the telephone app? That's like asking a drowning man if he'd like a drink of water.

4) I don't see Tesla coming up for air until early 2019 at which point they'll need to be delivering a major refresh to the MS. Seven years is too long for any manufacturer to stand still with body design, especially when some real competition will be showing up by 2020 with completely new cars. Tesla can't afford to look like they are reacting by shipping a major styling update AFTER the competition finally arrives. The MS will need some body changes, an entirely new interior, etc. I suspect they will have continually updated the drive train so it will probably not need too much change.

With the MS v2.0 there will be a new UI, probably different displays (perhaps more or larger versions of whatever they do with the M3), etc. And that is the point at which I think they will deliver the CID apps that we expected when we bought our cars. However, I doubt those apps will run on the MS v1.0 because it's clear that the current infotainment h/w platform is significantly underpowered and they aren't going to invest a lot of resources in the "old" platform. The new apps will be written to the new platform and displays, not the ones we have in our cars today.

We're on the "bleeding edge" of a new company and this is all probably to be expected. So let's refine those media player work arounds, hope they fix the most egregious problems, and save up for a new car in 2019!

Happy New Year!

 

[aesculus]

I am kind of surprised Electrek has not jumped on this (or at least Seeking Alpha ).

 

[supratachophobia]

I am kind of surprised Electrek has not jumped on this (or at least Seeking Alpha ).

I reached out to FredTesla but was ignored, so there is that. Not sure if I didn't phrase the request right, or if he just had more important stuff to report on. But I would like some public spotlight on this since it's only going to affect more and more users as the ownership base grows. Maybe even a Jalopik (sp?) article on the fact that while Tesla is king 0-60 and total range, both the Leaf and the Volt have better Media Players. Not sure if that is entirely true or just subjective honestly. But I can't help but wonder if that's one of the things Woz was hinting on since he is such a hardcore tech user. Maybe he couldn't help but notice the infotainment deficiencies.

 

[Boatguy]

I am kind of surprised Electrek has not jumped on this (or at least Seeking Alpha ).

Electrek is strictly a fanboy site, Tesla would have do something really bad to be called out there.

Seeking Alpha would only be interested if they could draw a line between the poor apps and poor vehicle sales and at this point that line is more likely to be drawn by the lack of AP2.0 s/w than CID app quality. The stock is driven by meeting sales expectations, and EM hype that creates the perception that vehicle sales will sustain and rise in the future (i.e., AP and M3).

These apps will not get any attention until there is a link between their quality and unit sales. For now, EM can people buying cars by pushing vaporware (e.g., "Full Self-Driving Hardware" and "the car will look at your calendar and take you there"), and buyers are don't dig deep enough to appreciate that:

- "Google Maps" on the touchscreen disappear as soon as you don't have a cell connection

- the wonderful irony of "meticulous noise engineering with Tesla's uniquely quiet powertrain to obtain the sound dynamics of a recording studio", coupled to a media player which is challenged to play anything more than low data rate streaming audio from a 3rd class music streaming service. At least in California, Bluetooth is pretty much a non-starter because as of today you're not allowed to touch your phone while driving unless it's in a mount and you can do it with one tap (i.e., you are an Uber driver).

- and a variety of other vaporware features on the Tesla web site.

You gotta hand it to EM. We used to say that Steve Job's had a "reality distortion field" around him, but I think EM could have shown Steve how to up his game!

 

[X Fan]

haha, UI showed I had 149 albums available today. Now I have 3 numbers 146 (typical), 149, 150. I guess I'm going to have to count to confirm.....

 

[dkonigs]

Take a gander upthread for detail. I removed excess tags. You're welcome to try all tags, just understanding of course that I for one would have no expectation of things working well in any view that is dependent upon them... and in some former code drops also discussed previously, as odd as it was, Folder View was still using some of that tag data (even though I for one do not believe it ever should except for perhaps the actual display of track info when playing back a single track in folder view.) Please do go ahead and do your tests... results vary from release-to-release, so have fun!

So this morning I popped in a USB stick where I've completely stripped the tags from most of the files. The scan took just as painfully long, and even restarted itself part-way though. But once it was done, I was able to use the "Folders" view to successfully navigate my media using the sane folder/filename layout completely unmolested by the perpetually-regressing metadata-based displays. (i.e. files sorted by filename, since it had no other data to go on)

 

[supratachophobia]

So this morning I popped in a USB stick where I've completely stripped the tags from most of the files. The scan took just as painfully long, and even restarted itself part-way though. But once it was done, I was able to use the "Folders" view to successfully navigate my media using the sane folder/filename layout completely unmolested by the perpetually-regressing metadata-based displays. (i.e. files sorted by filename, since it had no other data to go on)

That's actually pretty interesting since I have album, artist, track, title name in all my filenames (screw you iTunes and your track/title only BS). I might try this out. At least then things will play in album order. I wonder how search would react?

 

[dkonigs]

That's actually pretty interesting since I have album, artist, track, title name in all my filenames (screw you iTunes and your track/title only BS). I might try this out. At least then things will play in album order. I wonder how search would react?

If you go that far, the filenames become too long to actually read the song titles
I just do "## - Song Name.mp3" in my files, and determine artist/album by the directory structure.

 

[supratachophobia]

If you go that far, the filenames become too long to actually read the song titles
I just do "## - Song Name.mp3" in my files, and determine artist/album by the directory structure.

Oh poo, foiled again. I forgot the dual column view.

 

[BertL]

On another subject, first HAPPY NEW YEAR to fellow TMC Members living life with our Tesla Media Player and USB implementation.

It's a new year with all the hopes and dreams, and wanting to start some things fresh that entails. I had not driven my MS in a couple days and it's been off-charger with still 200+ miles of Rated Range left. No problem. Got in earlier this morning, and whammo -- no USB music. Yup, it had just started rescanning. Sigh. Switched to FM for a while until rescan completed, and was listening to USB when I arrived at my first destination. Got back into my MS 40 mins later, and whammo -- no USB music again. Yup, rescanning again. Switched to FM for a while, and then it went silent (on the same road I had just traveled in the other direction with FM). Changed stations. Same silence. Rebooted the CID while driving. FM came on quickly enough and rescan started over (as I would have expected). Switched to USB when rescan was complete, exiting my MS at my 2nd destination. Was back within 10 minutes, and this time had USB music immediately when I opened the door. How pleasant. 2 fails out of 3 to begin my new year. Ah, my first sanity check that some things don't change just because the clock rolled over, but who knows, there may be great improvements with the delayed 8.1 when that arrives.

Part II -- It gets worse

So, as you may remember from my previous post above, I had what I thought were increased USB rescans with .114 back on Sunday.

I have again not driven my MS until this morning. It has not been further charged, but is well over 170 miles of RR. Jumped-in to my MS, and what do you know? My USB music was playing. It was a great way to start the day -- or so I thought. Touching the CID, I attempted to open my garage door, change to my driver profile, and nothing. The CID looked normal enough, my map on the top and USB music info for the track I was playing on the bottom -- but the CID was 100% unresponsive to all touches. What it did do is briefly show sort of a bright blip in the upper left corner of the display each time I touched the display, so it wasn't completely dead. I rebooted the CID using both scroll wheels, and quickly enough Homelink and my profile were accessible again. USB rescan began. I backed-out and was on my way. Then I notice all the larger MP favorites icons (FM, Slacker, and USB) have lost their graphic... The icons themselves are still there, but FM has the station number but no image to go with it, and same with the others (this is the way former releases acted upon full CID reboot, but not in more recent releases like .40 from my experience). USB rescan eventually completed and this time instead of the USB track that was playing restarting (as has been the case since 8.0, thank you Tesla), the album art for the track appeared and the infamous "loading error" message appeared. Using the workaround most of us have figured-out by now with 8.0, I switch to FM and back to USB, make a track selection and it begins playing.

My net? 2.50.114 has introduced some new anomolies with perhaps additional USB rescans, CID lockups, and CID reboots seem to be acting differently in what is consistently cleared within MP (release-to-release or reboot-to-reboot, IDK). OH BOY. ...and to those that think some of us are just complaining or this is insignificant, well, it's these sort of continual annoyances that totally take away from my personal Tesla enjoyment. There just is no excuse for a premium engineering firm to put their owners that care through these sort of things over-and-over-and-over.