Problems playing music from 64GB microSD card

[fidesius]

Having a 64GB microSD card might be the culprit, but bear with me here.

I have a Samsung Galaxy SII via T-mobile, and despite seeing that the phone only supports up to 32GB microSD cards, I'd seen many reports online that it could support the 64GB cards without issue. Bought one on an Amazon sale (SanDisk Ultra 64GB SDXC, Class 10), formatted it in FAT32 using the phone, and dropped music in from my PC. Android lists the total space 59.64GB, which sounds right.

Currently, when playing music, the phone will experience several problems, including:

1. Sluggish speeds in scrolling through songs on the playlist and using functions such as Next, Play, and Pause and Volume Up/Down.

2. Many songs not playing at all, despite being a recognized file format (mp3).

3. Songs and playlists appearing duplicated within the app, but not in fact being duplicate in true on the microSD card.

4. Songs that do play do not proceed automatically to then next song once it's over.

I've used the stock Music Player app and Winamp, with the problems happening in both. For problem 1, I thought it just might be the app indexing all of the new songs, looking for album covers online, etc. I left the app alone for a few minutes to see if this resolved the issue, but it did not.

My gut tells me that this is some kind of memory issue, and my first thought was "If it can't figure out where something is, or the app is somehow seeing double, then it's an allocation issue," which would point towards the 64GB capacity simply being too much.

I also came across the idea of the cache being too small--stock is 128KB, and increasing this to 1024KB or 2048KB could improve playback. But I think if this were the case, all the music files would be recognized and play, but the playback would be stuttered and choppy. I haven't rooted my phone again to check this out yet.

Another idea I had was changing the filesystem on the microSD card from FAT32 to ext4, but since FAT32's storage limit is greater than 64GB (I think it's 2TB or greater), then this shouldn't matter, but it may be worth a shot.

Anyone have any ideas? Do I just need to format the card and return it to Amazon for a 32GB one, or perhaps try additional music players?

 

[kevindroid]

first welcome to the forum. i would try a different sd card to see where the problem really is. or try the card in another phone. it may be a fault with the card. hope you enjoy your stay here and find the answers you seek

 

[OverByter]

It's not because of the cards capacity, it's an either or situation, if it recognized and formatted the card it's definitely something else to blame.

 

[fidesius]

first welcome to the forum. i would try a different sd card to see where the problem really is. or try the card in another phone. it may be a fault with the card. hope you enjoy your stay here and find the answers you seek

Hmm, I had a 256MB card in it for a while from an old phone, and worked fine. I don't have another phone handy that will accept the 64GB card to check it.

It's not because of the cards capacity, it's an either or situation, if it recognized and formatted the card it's definitely something else to blame.

Yeah, that seems to make sense. If it couldn't handle that capacity of storage, it simply wouldn't have recognized it. Any ideas what it could be then?

 

[El Presidente]

Where did you get the card if you don't mind me asking? There are scammers on eBay (and even the amazon market place) that can make the card look like it's bigger than it is, so a 2GB Card can be made to look like a 32GB Card etc, causing problems like you've described.

Could you test it with an app like h2testw, see if that reports it as being corrupt/smaller than it is?

 

[mikedt]

It could be that the particular phone just wont work properly with SD-cards larger than 32GB, many of them wont.

Where did you get the card if you don't mind me asking? There are scammers on eBay (and even the amazon market place) that can make the card look like it's bigger than it is, so a 2GB Card can be made to look like a 32GB Card etc, causing problems like you've described.

Could you test it with an app like h2testw, see if that reports it as being corrupt/smaller than it is?

That's a very distinct possibility, there's a lot of fake SD-cards and USB sticks around. They actually lie to the OS, pretended they have a much larger capacity than they really have. They'll accept 32 or 64 GB of your data as well, and you'll get a directory telling you that your data is on there. But you certainly wont be able to read the data back. They all come from China of course. Put it this way, I certainly will not buy any famous name, like Sandisk, USB-sticks or SD-cards from the local supermarket.

 

[kevr6]

Convert to exFAT instead of FAT32

 

[iphonerepairs]

I think your phone memory is not supporting 64GB micro SD card.

 

[Phil Binner]

This sounds very similar to a problem I am having. I have a 64GB micro SD card in an Asus MEMO Pad 8. The tablet claims to support it, and it is possible to see all my music on it. I installed Jet audio to play the music, and found that many albums show as unrecognised artist, although the album titles and covers are OK. First I tried using other music players with the same result. Then I put the same SD card into my Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 7", and Jet Audio sees all the artists OK. I want to fix this or buy a different 8" tablet, but I want to understand it first to avoid getting the same issue again.

The card is a SANDISK Ultra 64GB. I did buy it on ebay, but I have no reason to believe it is other than it claims and I haven't actually found a song that doesn't play yet.

 

[argedion]

To help avoid certain issues like these when I get a card for my device I always let the device format it. I have little to no issues doing it this way. It's a fresh card so no data loss