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Should I use and SD card for music?

xnoctis93

Newbie
Sep 5, 2010
49
3
Hi:

I have at least 10 GB's of music I want to put on my phone. Should I be having an externa sd card I use to put the music on, or should I be using the internal memory of the phone? Is external any more convinient then internal or vice versa?

Thanks :p
 
The apps don't store to the 16gb built in storage, it goes to the 2gb ROM memory.

That was the only thing keeping me apprehensive about a lag fix but I went with it anyway.

I personally put my music on my external SD card. It's nice cuz i dont have to attach my phone to my laptop every time I wanna add music, I can just pop the card out.
 
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with that in mind, i'll be sure to put it all on an external. Is there a specific brand or kind of micro sd card you guys would recommend?

A-DATA, Crucial, OCZ or Lexar. Kingston and SanDisk are low-end brands.

Additional details can be found by searching past threads, as this is a very common topic that's been answered multiple times. ;)
 
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I'd rather use memory on the phone for stuff I can reload, like music, pictures, documents, and video that I have on my computer and then use my microSD card for pictures and video I take with my phone's camera, files and pictures that other people send me, etc. That stuff is more difficult to replace and I keep on the external card to remove if the phone goes bad or if I do an upgrade that erases everything on the phone.
 
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If you're lucky enough to have grandfathered in an old unlimited data plan, you could look into streaming software for your pc and phone that would allow you to access your entire home library of music over the air instead of having to use space on the phone. Just a thought.

I'd still keep a few gigs worth of music on the card anyways though, just in case of low signal areas or so forth.
 
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Definitely put it on the card, since with Android 2.1 you can't put apps on the card and can only store them on the internal storage. So the more things you can move to the card (music, video, pics, other files and media, etc), the more space you have for apps.

This is not entirely true. The phone has 16GB built in memory. About 2GB is reserved for the OS - the rest is seen as "Internal SD" - Apps will never see it.

Treat the "Internal SD" as a regular SD card.

I made the assumption the Internal is faster then External and so I record my movies and pics, and have my music on an external card. But the other suggestion about your phone going bad and losing stuff makes sense - so I may move movies and pics to external.
 
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I put "Back To The Future" on my phones Internal SD, because I don't have a big enough External SD card yet and for some reason the sound is a split second off. I think or hope putting it on an External SD would solve the problem...and for the same reason is why I would put music on the External SD too.
 
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I put "Back To The Future" on my phones Internal SD, because I don't have a big enough External SD card yet

How big is the file? I have encoded numerous DVDs for the Captivate and they all come in about 800-900MB.

and for some reason the sound is a split second off. I think or hope putting it on an External SD would solve the problem...and for the same reason is why I would put music on the External SD too.
Not necessarily. It could be the encode format. While the Captivate can process all sorts of video file settings, some combinations work better than others. For example, an h.264 video encoded with more than 1 b-frame will tend to display audio-sync issues... increasing with the number of b-frames used. This is why in my encode settings I say to only use 1 b-frame.

Transferring movies from DVD - CapFAQ
 
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If you're lucky enough to have grandfathered in an old unlimited data plan, you could look into streaming software for your pc and phone that would allow you to access your entire home library of music over the air instead of having to use space on the phone. Just a thought.

I'd still keep a few gigs worth of music on the card anyways though, just in case of low signal areas or so forth.

Keep in mind that this would drain your battery a lot faster. Since you brought it up Smoghog, I assume you have some experience, what app from the market would do this?
 
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Keep in mind that this would drain your battery a lot faster. Since you brought it up Smoghog, I assume you have some experience, what app from the market would do this?

You're right, this method would absolutely destroy battery life. I haven't set anything up like it on my Captivate yet, since I've yet to fill my sd card and I use last.fm alot, but I used to have it set up on my iphone.

A quick google search turned up these options, though. If you're interested:
Subsonic
 
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