# Flash drive for music? questions



## generankin (Oct 2, 2019)

About to take delivery of my 3, and wish to avoid using my phone via bluetooth to hear the many gig of music stashed on it. I use iTunes as my main storage system, load individual playlists onto my iPhone. So I bought a stubby little 128 GB flash drive to transfer my several playlists onto. So the questions:

1. If one has different playlists, is it best to separate them each into its own folder? Does the music 'button' on the touchscreen allow this, and then to play the contents of that folder?
2. Does the metadata (album art, song title) display?
3. Does the car's music 'app' enable shuffling tunes randomly, or does one simply use the steering wheel controls to switch tunes?

ANY advice/comments/.observations from folks who have used a flash drive to substitute as a music storage medium for what they otherwise would have on their phone or ipod is welcome & desired.


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## EchoCharlie3189 (Mar 28, 2019)

I might have bought the same "stubby little" flash drive you got and partitioned the drive into two separate ones to give TeslaCam someplace to save to. My experience with the car reading my music is it does sort by folder as well as use the meta data to organize it a bit. It doesn't do a great job though so you might have to plug it in, see how the car organizes it, then redo some data/folders to get the organization how you want it.

You can also turn on shuffle mode for individual folders/albums as well as play all songs on shuffle. 

With V10 though, I can't seem to find the USB menu to play the music so I will need to get back to you on that...


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## TrevP (Oct 20, 2015)

Since my iTunes collection is already organized I just copied all the folders inside the iTunes folder over to the Music partition I made on my Samsung T5 SSD.
Plugged it in and let the car index the partition and it works. It displays everything as you expect. You can view by artist, album, song, by folder. The only thing it doesn’t support is album art and of course playlists.


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## victor (Jun 24, 2016)

TrevP said:


> The only thing it doesn't support is album art and of course playlists.


It supports album art embedded inside an mp3/flac/m4a file.


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## generankin (Oct 2, 2019)

Been struggling with putting tunes on flash drive. As my pc is on W7, iTunes runs less smoothly than I suppose it does on a Mac, and 'manually' moving tunes from a playlist to a folder on the flash drive is messy, difficult, and inconsistent. So I had a look at the 'export' function on iTunes, and it quite happily exports my several playlists as xml files, allegedly tho sort of files that someone else's iTunes will equally happily accept.

Which raises the Big Question: does the Tesla music function 'see' tunes encoded that way on a flash drive? Does it also see the metadata as well? And if you can answer 'yes', does that mean that you've done it and it actually worked?

Thanks in advance!


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## SoCalWine (Oct 1, 2018)

EchoCharlie3189 said:


> I might have bought the same "stubby little" flash drive you got and partitioned the drive into two separate ones to give TeslaCam someplace to save to. My experience with the car reading my music is it does sort by folder as well as use the meta data to organize it a bit. It doesn't do a great job though so you might have to plug it in, see how the car organizes it, then redo some data/folders to get the organization how you want it.
> 
> You can also turn on shuffle mode for individual folders/albums as well as play all songs on shuffle.
> 
> With V10 though, I can't seem to find the USB menu to play the music so I will need to get back to you on that...


Have you found USB on menu yet?


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## EchoCharlie3189 (Mar 28, 2019)

SoCalWine said:


> Have you found USB on menu yet?


Yea, it popped back up and has stayed up though some songs are having playback issues. Not sure if it is a software bug or loose usb connection. I have gotten maybe 3 software updates in the last two weeks with all of the same V10 release notes so I think they are working through some fixes.


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## MelindaV (Apr 2, 2016)

generankin said:


> Been struggling with putting tunes on flash drive. As my pc is on W7, iTunes runs less smoothly than I suppose it does on a Mac, and 'manually' moving tunes from a playlist to a folder on the flash drive is messy, difficult, and inconsistent. So I had a look at the 'export' function on iTunes, and it quite happily exports my several playlists as xml files, allegedly tho sort of files that someone else's iTunes will equally happily accept.
> 
> Which raises the Big Question: does the Tesla music function 'see' tunes encoded that way on a flash drive? Does it also see the metadata as well? And if you can answer 'yes', does that mean that you've done it and it actually worked?
> 
> Thanks in advance!


the car will not recognize (play) the iTunes playlists, but will read the other metadata (album art, etc)


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## sduck (Nov 23, 2017)

generankin said:


> I had a look at the 'export' function on iTunes, and it quite happily exports my several playlists as xml files, allegedly tho sort of files that someone else's iTunes will equally happily accept.
> 
> Which raises the Big Question: does the Tesla music function 'see' tunes encoded that way on a flash drive? Does it also see the metadata as well? And if you can answer 'yes', does that mean that you've done it and it actually worked?


No. Those xml files are just another kind of playlist - you need the actual music files in folders. I answered this in more detail on that other forum you asked this in.


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