Yeah, lack of playlists on the car sucks. The folder workaround is a good one, given the limitations we're currently stuck with. Hopefully that'll change soon.
I'm actually kind of hoping that the whole Apple Lossless thing is fixed by 6.2. In the conference call he said better audio codec support, and Apple Lossless has been open source with sample code for a long time now (as I've pointed out to them in emails). Since he specifically said audio codec support, I'm think it's that, or more likely Bluetooth aptX support vs. something as huge as CarPlay or the Android equiv. though someday I do personally still hope for full CarPlay support.
On another note, and relevant to the aptX possibility, while the purist in me wants lossless libraries anywhere I can, I'm virtually certain at this point that the Bluetooth connection in the S supports AAC. Doesn't help Android folks out for the most part, but certainly does all the iPhone users. I've verified the part Tesla uses supports it, and based on communications with them personally, as well as past communications I've seen either here and/or the Tesla forums, I am pretty certain they utilize it. The only drawback, aside from the fact it's still compressed, is that far as I've seen once I start really digging into the details, I'm pretty sure the AAC (or whatever source) from the iPhone is decoded to lossless, then re-encoded as AAC again at a specific bitrate (it's in the spec - 256 maybe?) by the bluetooth stack in the phone rather than the phone just sending the AAC data direct from the song file. Still though, sounds a hell of a lot better than the baseline Bluetooth audio. I'm sure that much of it is just due to my aging ears
but I tested Apple lossless (converted to Flac - still lossless) of a couple songs vs. the iTunes music match 256kbps AAC of the same song, via the iPhone connected by Bliuetooth, and can't honestly say I could hear a difference. Makes me a little sad, but from my A/B test days doing codec testing in a previous job, though 128 up to somewhat less than 320kbps mp3 was painfully obvious vs. lossless, >160kbps AAC was mostly transparent, and I can't recall 256+ AAC being able to be picked by anyone we tested with, including the professed golden ears.
Regardless, I want my whole library available independent of cell connection, even if I choose to often just use my phone. And if most of my library is in lossless, and TB are cheap, seems silly not to keep it lossless for the car. Even if they start natively supporting Apple Lossless, which I hope they do, I'll still be needing a quick and easy way to keep a copy of my library in sync. I think ideally I'd want a tool that could, without a lot of setup each time, copy the whole library, and playlists, or any subset by playlist, to the removable storage used for the car with one click (once the initial selections are made first run).
In my program, I was thinking of adding a details view of operations in progress next, but more I think about it, the more I think playlist support is more important for actual functionality. While seeing lots of progress bars chugging along is reassuring, once it's no longer a novelty and you just want to hit it and forget it, the actual usefulness of having folders made for each playlist seems a lot more of a win. I hate the duplicated space
Will have to check - bet they'd support ext2/3 filesystems with hard links - thought I saw a utility another forum user had written a while back that handled shuffle by doing that, but special formatting is a mess to ask people to deal with. Just hope that they'll support playlist files soon.
