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Okay. I thought w/ the tech package, we could load music. any one know the story behind what happened? the point was to put your music library on the car. that means there's got to be a hard drive in this car somewhere and a way to load the music.

Still no answer from anyone at tesla on this yet. next person on delivery, can you ask?

It is said that the storage hardware is there and will be enabled with an upcoming software update. Same with Wifi.
http://www.teslamotors.com/forum/forums/punch-list

For the record, FAT16 and FAT32 are NOT interchangeable.
From the posts here, it's looking like FAT32 is the one Model S likes.

Next person should get a date when the storage functionality is unveiled.

I've been successful getting music to play from a USB stick, but it appears to be inadequately buffered for 192kbs. I experience skips and stutters, especially with a slower USB stick.

The good news is that you can fill the stick with lots of music, because the navigation is very nicely done. But they need to fix the codec so it plays smoothly.

I have had no problems playing flac audio files from a fast 32GB USB thumb drive. I also tried 5.1 audio flac files but those don't seem to be supported. Hopefully this will be added in the future to support real surround sound.

So it turns out that my problems with the USB stick were the fault of a bad Notebook computer that created invalid files. After trying multiple sticks and experiencing the same sort of skipping, I falsely concluded that it was the fault of the car. A little while later, we fortunately noted some mangled photos on another USB stick and, voila, realized that it was the Notebook's fault. I recreated the music on my iMac and all is good. I can now say that Tesla has the best MP3 player I've seen in any car because it is so easy to navigate and provides the ability to select any part of a track.

I just purchased a 64GB USB flash drive ($29 on Amazon!) and put 60 GBs of music on it as well as a number of podcasts. I was surprised at how quickly it was processed when I plugged it in, and I'm still pleased with the ease of navigating so much data.

It would be great if Tesla could add a few features that would make Podcasts work better from a USB drive. The first would be 60 second advance, 10 second reverse buttons. The second would be continuous updating of the scrub slider so you can aim for a particular time. Third would be varying the speed of the scrub based on the distance from the slider (as in iOS) so you would have more control over the loction. Finally, and possibly most important, it would be good if the car would remember the highest location played in a podcast so that if you interrupted a podcast to play a song, you could go back to the same spot on the podcast.

The car should recognize a podcast (based on a folder name convention or the length of the file?) and treat it differently from music. For example, when you leave the car, it normally keeps playing music at a lower volume. With a podcast, it should stop so that when you start driving again, it takes of from the last location in the audio file.

Tried a test last night and marked several songs on the USB stick as "favorites".

Then went to the Favorites menu and selected one of the songs to play.

When that song finished - it went to the NEXT SONG IN THE FAVORITES list!

This isn't an ideal playlist - because the Favorites list is sorted alphabetically - but it's better than nothing until playlists are supported.

Will run some more testing to see if this really works...