Shuffle!

[jerry33]

Secondly, I went to test the Tune-In podcast fix. I load up This American Life, and it doesn't work at all. The "scrubber bar" doesn't show up. But something like Science Friday works!? I noticed that TAL was "buried" further in the Tune-In menu. Could that be it? This one is like 1/2 step forward.

This has been broken ever since 6.0. About 3/4 of my songs don't have the scrubber bar (or album art). It appears that with each new release the amount of songs the system can identify gets lower. There are a few albums where it can find the artwork on some tracks but not on others.

I didn't know about the Favourites non-repeat bug.

I'm pretty sure that most of these problems are because the people that write the applications never actually have to use the software. If they did, the application would be very different.

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Is it possible to shuffle all music on a USB drive?

Yes. Select "songs" and it will play every track in shuffled order.

 

[majorlance]

It's a little extra work but I copy my playlists in folders and then rename the genre of the songs to the playlist name. It means that I do have duplicates of songs in song view but I almost always prefer to use genre/playlist mode. I put in a second usb stick that has all of the songs (straight out of iTunes). I'll switch to that USB drive if I want to play by album, artist or song.

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BTW, the album art if a complete mess. I tried and tried to decode how they do it without any success. Even have a question in to engineering...

The issue is that the artwork is not pulled from the song but looked up via the internet. And it seems to be very finicky...

 

[jerry33]

The issue is that the artwork is not pulled from the song but looked up via the internet. And it seems to be very finicky...

My first hypothesis is that over time they have received complaints about copyright violation and so have pulled artwork. That would explain the reduced amount of artwork with each new release. The second hypothesis is that it doesn't pull artwork unless 3G signal strength is high enough--I don't have a lot of confidence in this one.

 

[Chico]

It's a little extra work but I copy my playlists in folders and then rename the genre of the songs to the playlist name. It means that I do have duplicates of songs in song view but I almost always prefer to use genre/playlist mode. I put in a second usb stick that has all of the songs (straight out of iTunes). I'll switch to that USB drive if I want to play by album, artist or song.

That's roughly how a playlist works...instead of a folder full of duplicated songs, it's a list of those same songs, each item in the list points to the song somewhere on the drive. Tesla needs to add playlist capability to their USB interface. It's not too hard to program, and there are several standardized playlist formats. Hopefully Tesla contracts the task to someone who knows how it should work, with the elegance Tesla owners expect.

In the meantime, I've been doing much what you have, creating folders and/or partitions with styles or selections I want to hear in a mix. For example, I have a Jazz partition, a Classical partition, a Rock partition, a HipHop partition, etc. Within each of those partitions I use folders to further arrange the music.

Clumsy and time-consuming, but it works for me for the time being...

 

[KurtR]

I'm finding that the shuffle doesn't seem very random. I have approximately 4000 songs on my thumb drive and in just the past couple of days I've heard at least 4 songs off of one album and at least 2-3 from a few other albums. while many others haven't played at all, obviously.

I'm not sure that this evidences non-random behavior. If you are shuffling your entire collection and the shuffle is random, out of 4000 songs there will be many coincidental instances of songs from the same album playing somewhat close to each other, just because you have so many albums from which the coincidence could possibly occur. When using shuffle on my Ipod classic, for example, with approximately 2000 songs, I will occasionally run into multiple sequential songs by the same artist, or sometimes two different version of the same title (like both Hendrix's and Stevie Ray Vaughan's version of Voodoo Child) will play within a couple tracks of each other. Once I even had two songs play next to each other that were sequential tracks on the same album. And unless you have had an instance of the same song repeating within one shuffled playback cycle, it would be a shuffle instead of random playback.

 

[ken830]

It's actually very hard for our human brains to accept true randomness as random. Every possible sequence is 100% equally likely as any other sequence. So even if, by chance, every album plays in the exact track-order, that sequence was just as random as any other sequence. But our brains tells us that this outcome is impossible. But if you think about it logically, if you have a large enough sample size, you should be shocked if this exact sequence never occurs, because it is equally likely as any other sequence.

What this means is that our brains want some distribution of results before it "feels" random to us. Game programmers actually can't use (pseudo)-random number generators in games because gamers will feel that the result isn't random enough. Instead, they need to code in such a way that takes past results into account so that similar results/patterns won't repeat too often, which is very likely in true-random situations.

If you think about it, the lottery numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 is equally likely to win (or lose) as any other set of numbers. But I'd be shocked if this was the winning number set and the people/press didn't go crazy over it.

 

[Alysashley79]

I use my iPhone for everything and thought the shuffle would work for that...nope...really hope tesla fixes this for a future update its kind of a pain to have to be touching my iPhone to get it started as I drive.

In in rgards to the artwork I was told that the lack there of is a bug and will be coming in a futur fix release.

 

[rpavlicek]

Excuse my ignorance on shuffle...

Lets say I have my USB stick with folders for each artist and inside those a folder for each album.

Is there a way to shuffle by artist or genre without selecting a specific album/song?

 

[bob_p]

I've been using my USB Favorites list for playing songs since I got my car 2 years ago.

With 6.1 and the new shuffle feature, unfortunately it doesn't work on the Favorites list.

The simple solution was to make a separate USB with the songs on my Favorites list - and play that USB from the Songs list in shuffle mode.

It's also possible to shuffle a Folder - but it appears that when the system is playing from a folder, not all of the song information is displayed. Which is unfortunate, because folders could be used as an alternative to playlists.

6.1 is an improvement - and hopefully they'll continue to work on this in the next release.

 

[Chico]

Excuse my ignorance on shuffle...

Lets say I have my USB stick with folders for each artist and inside those a folder for each album.

Is there a way to shuffle by artist or genre without selecting a specific album/song?

"By Genre", what I do is first select a Genre, then select any single song from the resulting list of songs, then press Shuffle. Since my genres all have many thousands of songs in them, that's Random enough for me.

"By Artist" doesn't work so well. For some silly reason, when you select "By Artist", all the artists are displayed as folders, and then within each folder the songs are further organized by album. So if I want to listen to, for example, all Miles Davis, I get a folder named "Miles Davis" but within it are hundreds of folders representing all the Miles albums I have, with between 1 to 15 cuts in each. So Shuffle mode, as implemented by Tesla, won't play my entire Miles collection, it only plays the cuts from one album, and then I have to manipulate the user interface some more to get to the next album's cuts. Dangerous for driving, annoying for listening.

One simple fix for that would be to allow the user to hit "Shuffle" while focused on a folder, not just a song in a list. Then I could hear a random playback of all my Miles Davis cuts. But no, you can't initiate playback from a folder, you have to initiate from a song within a list. Sheesh.

I doubt that the person who designed and programmed the USB interface for Tesla has ever used it extensively, or solicited any user feedback. If he/she had, it likely wouldn't be so mediocre.

 

[majorlance]

You could always create a playlist in iTunes for a specific artist and then copy those songs to a folder and rename the Genre to the artist. Of course this only makes sense for artist that you really, really like and want to listen to specifically. Then play back in Genre mode and hit shuffle.

All of this, of course, if like trying to improve a 1999, pre-iPod music player like the Rio... (okay who remembers this gem of a player?). The functionality we all desire was defined at least 10 years ago by Apple and then refined in many ways, by many... Even my old Winamp desktop player (buried by AOL) had more functionality in many ways than the current Tesla system. At least it supported M3U playlists!

That all said, I love driving my Tesla and can live with the work-arounds of the current system... it will improve!

 

[pilotSteve]

I do believe it is a shuffled list (but unsure of max list size before it is reshuffled). Why? Touch "previous" and I hear previous tracks in the shuffled order they were played.

 

[Chico]

All of this, of course, is like trying to improve a 1999, pre-iPod music player like the Rio... (okay who remembers this gem of a player?). The functionality we all desire was defined at least 10 years ago by Apple and then refined in many ways, by many... Even my old Winamp desktop player (buried by AOL) had more functionality in many ways than the current Tesla system. At least it supported M3U playlists!

Yes indeed, that's why Tesla's crude last century implementation is embarrassing, and maddening considering the price we paid for a premium sound system.

That all said, I love driving my Tesla and can live with the work-arounds of the current system... it will improve!

And I totally agree. The car is great even though the sound system's interface is primitive at best. I think Tesla should know of buyers' dissatisfaction with this, but I truly enjoy the car and happily promote it to potential buyers, even when they question the music system's deficiencies. And the recently added shuffle function, while minimally functional, is a long-awaited and welcome update.

 

[ken830]

Even if you browse and play by folder, the shuffle/repeat buttons don't show up. And worse yet, the "previous" button doesn't even work. I can only skip to the next song, not return to the previous.

 

[Merrill]

Ok, I have read this thread and looked in the owners manual and played with the repeat and shuffle modes. Can someone explain to me how these are supposed to work. If I have shuffle blue it will play the songs in my chosen album in a random order and will stop when all are played? What happens if you have shuffle blue with the #1 showing. I assume repeat when in blue will repeat the song or album? What happens if you have both on?

 

[jerry33]

Ok, I have read this thread and looked in the owners manual and played with the repeat and shuffle modes. Can someone explain to me how these are supposed to work. If I have shuffle blue it will play the songs in my chosen album in a random order and will stop when all are played? What happens if you have shuffle blue with the #1 showing. I assume repeat when in blue will repeat the song or album? What happens if you have both on?

As far as I'm able to tell, it works this way:

If repeat is on, it will play the songs in order forever.
If shuffle is on, it will play the songs in random order and stop when all have been played--there is some question as to whether some will be played multiple times.
If both are on, it will shuffle forever.
If you have set up favourites, it will play the songs in order and stop at the end.

 

[Merrill]

As far as I'm able to tell, it works this way:

If repeat is on, it will play the songs in order forever.
If shuffle is on, it will play the songs in random order and stop when all have been played--there is some question as to whether some will be played multiple times.
If both are on, it will shuffle forever.
If you have set up favourites, it will play the songs in order and stop at the end.

Thanks jerry33, what about shuffle on and the #1 showing.

 

[gzerninplatz]

with "1" showing, it will repeat that song forever.

 

[bob_p]

Shuffle appears to be a "global" setting. I have 2 USBs and when shuffle is on - it's on for both USBs - and if I want to shuffle on one and play songs in sequence on the other, I have to toggle the shuffle setting when going between the two USB ports.

Shuffle should be specific to each source.

 

[KurtR]

Shuffle should be specific to each source.

That's the kind of inconvenience I could live with. What I'd rather have is a more comprehensive browsing hierarchy to play multi-artist albums, for example, or to be able to sort songs by composer instead of merely artist. I'd also like to see a "track number" play order in album view instead of being alphabetical, so that if I am playing an album the tracks will play either in the order given by the "track number" metadata tag, or in a shuffled order. I can't imagine anyone specifically wanting to hear tracks on an album alphabetically.