I recently got a new Model 3 and decided to see if the USB drive would work for playing music. It works pretty great with a few limitations.
I have a home recording studio and so the most common use case for me would be to check my music or podcast mixes in the car using the USB drive.
We also have the option to stream the music or mix it directly off of the phone (mine is an iPhone 12 Pro with iOS15). So far I have been able to play audio from any phone app over Bluetooth. With that said the playback from the USB drive is slightly better than the Bluetooth playback, but the BT sounds really good, to begin with, higher quality than my previous car experiences and good enough for rock and roll as they say.
I have a Mac in my studio and was able to format a standard 15G USB thumb drive as MS-DOS Fat so that I could copy files easily from the studio to the thumb drive and play them back in the car. If the files are in a folder then Tesla will recognize them as an "album". It will also list all the songs in one big list, and it has a Genre tab but I don't know how to specify that in the files. It lists all the music files by name and doesn't seem to allow "most recent" which is a drag since I would almost always be looking for the most recent mix that I had created. The playback from the USB drive is very snappy and much easy to click on a song and have it play quickly from the USB than from any of the streaming services or even from my iPhone.
When you plug the USB stick into the USB C jack in the lower console it takes a moment to show up on the screen as a selectable music option. This is probably because it is loading the file names into the Tesla. If you have a big drive then it might take a while so be selective with how much of a library you bring. I'm not sure if it remembers the song names next time you get in the car if you haven't yet unplugged the USB drive.
I also tested this with an OWC Envoy Pro FX 1TB SSD which worked great! This has the Thunderbolt USB C cable on it and plugged straight into the TESLA USB C port no problem. For the smaller thumb drive I had to use an adapter to go from USB A to USB C but that worked great.
Next up I will test out the Strey video capture feature using these drives and see how that goes.
So far so good!
Cheers!
Lij Shaw
I have a home recording studio and so the most common use case for me would be to check my music or podcast mixes in the car using the USB drive.
We also have the option to stream the music or mix it directly off of the phone (mine is an iPhone 12 Pro with iOS15). So far I have been able to play audio from any phone app over Bluetooth. With that said the playback from the USB drive is slightly better than the Bluetooth playback, but the BT sounds really good, to begin with, higher quality than my previous car experiences and good enough for rock and roll as they say.
I have a Mac in my studio and was able to format a standard 15G USB thumb drive as MS-DOS Fat so that I could copy files easily from the studio to the thumb drive and play them back in the car. If the files are in a folder then Tesla will recognize them as an "album". It will also list all the songs in one big list, and it has a Genre tab but I don't know how to specify that in the files. It lists all the music files by name and doesn't seem to allow "most recent" which is a drag since I would almost always be looking for the most recent mix that I had created. The playback from the USB drive is very snappy and much easy to click on a song and have it play quickly from the USB than from any of the streaming services or even from my iPhone.
When you plug the USB stick into the USB C jack in the lower console it takes a moment to show up on the screen as a selectable music option. This is probably because it is loading the file names into the Tesla. If you have a big drive then it might take a while so be selective with how much of a library you bring. I'm not sure if it remembers the song names next time you get in the car if you haven't yet unplugged the USB drive.
I also tested this with an OWC Envoy Pro FX 1TB SSD which worked great! This has the Thunderbolt USB C cable on it and plugged straight into the TESLA USB C port no problem. For the smaller thumb drive I had to use an adapter to go from USB A to USB C but that worked great.
Next up I will test out the Strey video capture feature using these drives and see how that goes.
So far so good!
Cheers!
Lij Shaw