Music in the car

While I did listen to NPR while I was commuting for a long time, I pretty much constantly listen to music in the car. The means to do this in my daily drivers went from juggling CDs for far longer than I care to admit (a 6-disc in-dash changer in several, an in-trunk changer in the 911) to playing stuff from my fairly large MP3 collection, first by burning DVDs of MP3s that the 911 could play on the in-car single disc, and then moving to dumping a bunch of stuff on a thumb drive or SD card, which was something that worked great on my 2010 Ford Flex (not really my daily driver) but has been sorta so-so at best on subsequent cars. Longer discussion about this for the Jeep in the dislikes section of this post and previously in my discussion of the Tesla here.

It's clear that Tesla doesn't really care about supporting USB as an audio source anymore, because all of my complaints about it keep getting worse rather than better, and they really want that USB port and storage device for the dashcam anyway. It's now basically rotted to the point of being unusable due to frequent audio drop-outs, so I've been looking for other alternatives. 

I have Amazon Music but there is no native app for that in the Tesla, only for Spotify, Slacker, and Tidal, none of which I use and thus would require a lot of setup work/additional subscriptions, etc. I suspect the lack of Amazon at least has to do with Elon and Jeff's ongoing "rocket measuring" contest, and I'm annoyed by the fact that something so simple is being hampered by a pissing match between two petulant billionaires, but that's life in 2022's Capitalist Technology Wonderland, I guess. 

Streaming Amazon Music via Bluetooth on my phone kinda(?) works, in that it will eventually result in music coming out of the car stereo, and I can see what's playing on the screen and skip to the next track with the car controls. But it never starts automatically - it almost always requires opening the app and telling it to play something. It rarely remembers what it was playing even if you've only been out of the car for a couple of hours. There's a widget you can add to the phone's home screen that shows what's playing, but even if it's displaying a song, getting in the car and pressing play on the widget does nothing, and you always end up having to open the app. Plus because I'm on Prime Music, but not unlimited tier, I would either have to pay more to get all of the music I want and then go through and add it all, or fight with the app even more to see if it deals ok with a combination of online music and local files and put a bunch of MP3s on the microSD card in my phone. And given how poorly it seems to manage its primary function, I'm not optimistic about that combination going well. I suspect it'd work ok if I built a bunch of playlists, but what I really like to do is to just point it at the whole collection, tell it to shuffle everything, and skip what I'm not in the mood for. 

But in looking for a decent Android MP3 player app so I could bypass that nonsense and hopefully find something that Just Works for playing music, I discovered that Youtube Music (formerly Google Play Music) has retained a feature I forgot it had, which is that you can upload your own music to the cloud and then stream it from the app. I was further pleasantly surprised to learn that they didn't hide that behind their premium subscription service. As I recall, it used to have a fairly low limit to the number of songs you could add, but they've also raised it to 100K songs, so I was able to basically just dump everything I have on there. There are still some limitations on how you use that music (details in the link), but it seemed like a worthwhile experiment before using up all of my spare local storage on the phone and playing with a bunch of different apps. The other tradeoffs is that I'm finding it isn't particularly smart about recognizing songs from metadata so artist and album info is incomplete and inaccurate a lot, and it isn't doing what I thought it was doing and recognizing the song from file info and hashes and adding the Youtube Music source file of the same song to your collection. It's actually uploading all of that data, and playing back your version of the file! So if the original is low-quality, or has artifacts from the CDROM drive skipping when you ripped it, like some of my stuff unfortunately does, those are still present. There's no native Youtube Music app on the Tesla either, and I just recently discovered that while there is one for Android Auto (which I have available in the new head unit in the 911), it doesn't have the section that allows you to access and play stuff from your uploaded library at all. I haven't tested if I can start it from the phone and be able to control it properly via the native app yet. Also, YouTube Music isn't much better at resuming play when you get in the car than Amazon. At least their widget mostly works, but I'm rapidly concluding that this isn't really the solution I'm looking for either. 

I feel like this shouldn't be this difficult, given the amount of general computing and audio devices I have to solve this problem, even if my use case is probably a little different than some. I'm sure there will be more to come on this post.