USB Drive Album Art Logic Decoding Help Needed!

[majorlance]

Does anyone know the web service or logic that the Model S uses to find album art for songs on a usb drive? (I realize and understand that it is *not* loading the art from the song files.)

It does a pretty decent job of finding most artwork and I'm trying to correct the 10% or so that it misses... labor of love. I'm currently checking the songs against what is on iTunes and that seems to be hit or miss. If the album title or song title is obviously wrong, it is easy to fix. But other times, it is correct down to the punctuation and it just won't show.

A couple of notes:
1) The file name of the song must be changed for it to analyze and look up the artwork. Changing the tag alone does nothing... (so I have a file name randomizer that i use to force a new lookup).
2) Songs that appear on multiple albums will have the artwork shown for some albums but not others. (I've spent too much time trying to decode this!) But you have to try one album name at a time to determine which one the Tesla will recognize.

I don't have the network tools to sniff out what sites it is hitting but that would help a ton if someone is willing to take a look!

Any help or tips would be appreciated.

Thanks!

 

[majorlance]

I sent a request in to customer service on this... received a prompt reply and commitment to forward it on to engineering. I'm guessing this isn't (or should be) at the top of the poor engineers list but it would be interesting to get a little insight. Love it if they just read the art that was already embedded but overall, whoever did the art lookup code on the Tesla did a good job as I seem to get about a pretty high hit rate.

Now, if anybody has any insight...

 

[RichardL]

I keep my files in a directory on the USB - if you change the directory name to something not previously used, it will re-process the files

I have all my files correctly tagged, but I find the lookup seems to be using only artist and title - not the album tag at all. Often the album name displayed (and matching artwork) is not what is tagged in the file.

With 6.1 (only limited experience obviously) I seem to have fewer successful matches than ever - it seems like the majority of even common songs are failing now. I was wondering if the failure was to do with communications or with the art database itself, but since they used to be matched previously, I have to assume this is a communication error with the database lookup.

 

[majorlance]

I'm going to do some testing this weekend but it is odd the songs that it finds and those it can't. Well known, older rock songs by main stream bands aren't found and I've a few obscure album/artists that it does.

The car (as others have stated) is caching the tags on its internal disk. I've changed a tag like album name but it won't show up unless I change the file name (or folder). My bet is that they don't grab the artwork to conserve disk space. Just a guess but they're pulling album, song name, artist from the song tags, so why not artwork? Has to be to save space or that the data structure only handles text. With that said, they're still pulling the audio off of the usb drive so they could pull the art too.

 

[jerry33]

I'm going to do some testing this weekend but it is odd the songs that it finds and those it can't. Well known, older rock songs by main stream bands aren't found and I've a few obscure album/artists that it does.

The car (as others have stated) is caching the tags on its internal disk. I've changed a tag like album name but it won't show up unless I change the file name (or folder). My bet is that they don't grab the artwork to conserve disk space. Just a guess but they're pulling album, song name, artist from the song tags, so why not artwork? Has to be to save space or that the data structure only handles text. With that said, they're still pulling the audio off of the usb drive so they could pull the art too.

As far as I can tell, they pull the artwork each time the song plays (this might not be true if you repeat the song shortly after being played). The amount of artwork they find has been significantly less with each version. The first version I had (4.2 IIRC) found almost all the artwork and it was almost always correct. 6.0 found far less artwork and was often hilariously incorrect. The latest (6.1) hardly ever finds any artwork, so little that I can't tell if it gets it right more often. Far worse than the artwork, the shuffle doesn't shuffle favourites, so the work-around is to delete everything but favourites off of the drive.