I’m about to buy a Tesla and the funny thing about it is that with all the hi-tech doodads included, one thing really lacking is the audio. It supports a streaming service natively, but my understanding is the max is 320kbps. It also supports blutooth streaming but the opinion of other owners is that it isn’t very good, as most BT is. The third option is a USB drive with music stored on it, which it can apparently use in FLAC or AIFF on a FAT32 stick. But what it won’t do is take an audio stream via USB, nor via wifi, nor apparently any other way. It does NOT have an AUX jack either, and that is on purpose. Basically, they want to be able to control all input, and of course charge for it. I wouldn’t even mind paying but there is no hi-res option.
That brings me here. I use Volumio at home mostly as an endpoint that supports DLNA and Airplay so we can stream from any device. I know that Volumio can support Qobuz and Tidal and I’m already a Qobuz subscriber but I run it on my iMac and stream via DLNA. It works beautifully.
What I’m looking for is a way to use Volumio on a Raspberry Pi so that the USB output emulates a Mass Storage Device so that the Tesla will read it as such since it won’t read an audio stream. I’ve done a little research on this and the programming goes over my head, but I can see how it could be possible if you know what you are doing. It would have to keep up with the requests for data as mass storage reads, and I would guess buffer the data as it comes from the audio stream. The Tesla would interpret this as a file read and use its internal DAC to create the audio output. Piece of cake, right?
Alternatively, a Raspberry Pi that would just take an audio stream in and output as mass storage without the Volumio connection would do as well. I’m not looking to capture and store the audio, not looking to break any copyright rules. If anybody knows of existing software to do this it would be fine too.
Since I started writing this I’ve actually ordered the car, apparently the forum saves everything you type since it was already here when I came to revisit.