Problem with transferring mp3 to 32gb card

[jaclynmckewan]

I got a Motorola Droid from Verizon in the spring. It came with a Sandisk 16gb card, but I have over 20 gb of music, so for the time being I've only kept some of my music on there. I always transferred music through the USB connection, using Windows Explorer (I have Windows 7). I have all the files tagged with title/artist/album etc. but for easy organization I have them sorted into folders - a folder for each artist, and a subfolder for each album. Right now my phone is running Froyo (Android 2.2).

My husband recently bought me a Samsung 32 gb micro SDHC card that he got on eBay. So of course as soon as it was in the phone, I wanted to transfer my music. I connected it to the computer via USB, and copied all my music folders onto it. Explorer showed that it would take a few hours for the transfer, so I left it plugged in overnight.

The next morning it seemed to be complete, so I disconnected the phone and started up my music player. To my surprise, it only showed 4 artists. I went to Settings --> SD Card & Phone storage. It showed over 20 GB used. I plugged the phone back into the computer, and it again showed up as a drive in Windows Explorer, and it showed that all the music was there. But it wasn't showing up on the phone.

When I got to work, I tried plugging it into that computer, but now Windows Explorer only showed those 4 artists.

I later noticed that the 5th artist folder had an album name with an apostrophe in it, which was reflected in the folder name. I wondered if there was a problem with non-alphanumeric characters so I combed through all the folders, removing anything that wasn't a letter or number. I tried copying over just a few at a time, but still, once I looked at the phone, not all the songs were there.

My husband suggested formatting the card. On the phone, I tried to unmount it, and the screen said "unmounting in progress" but never finished, so I was not able to select the format option. My husband then took the card out and formatted it from the PC, as FAT32.

I then tried just copying over the first 5 folders. Then I looked at the music player. Two artists were completely missing. Most of the others came over okay, but several of them (from different artists/albums, seemingly randomly) came up listed as "unknown artist" even though they are all fully tagged.

I don't really know what to do. My husband thinks that maybe the Samsung card has some file format restrictions, but I'd hate to think I have to go through thousands of music files and eliminate all non-alphanumeric characters from the file names. I'm not sure why this problem didn't happen with the previous card, which was from Sandisk.

I've checked this forum and Googled, and I can't find anyone else who's had this problem. Can anyone advise?

[tp76]

First I will say you always have to be careful buying something like this from e-bay, I bought a 32Gb sandisk card from VZW and had no issues putting over 16GB of music on it...special characters and all

I would try erasing the card via computer, formating it with your handheld device, unmounting it and transferring some of your music via card reader and then remounting the card to your Droid and see if this works

The write speed capabilities of the Droid are extremely slow and a lot can go wrong while writing 20Gb of MP3 files

[dvdcatalyst]

Is it possible that the folder path + file name of the artists that do not show up exceed 256 characters?

Try moving the songs or the latest folder in the chain closer to the root of the drive.

So if you have something like

/Music/Music Kind/Artist/Album/song.mp3

move the Album folder (with the songs) to the root of the drive

/Album/song.mp3

and see if they show up then.

[scottrwood]

I would do as others recommend and delete everything via PC first, but then once the card is empty, try the format again on the Droid.

[Brian1]

Sounds like it is not a true 32gig card. Google has some post to test the card with an app called h2test2.exe to see what it may really be.

Brian

[ndfan4u]

I have been thinking about buying a 32 gig card, and I would only buy it from Verizon. Never from Ebay cause you never know what your're getting. Too many frauds praying on innocent people. Just mho.

[dvdcatalyst]

Rather than formatting, I would suggest to just try the folder change I suggested before.
The formatting of the card (FAT16/FAT32/NTFS etc) determines on how the folder path information is stored, and how many characters it can contain. In addition, certain operating systems have different limitations on that as well, which basically explains why the songs showed up on your computer at home, but did not show up on the computer at work (and not on your phone).

Rather than formatting your card and spend another night to copy your songs over, save yourself some time, and just move/rename the folders so the path-length is a lot shorter, and if it doesn't work, you can always format the card afterwards.

For additional reads:

Song limit? - Android Forums

Several years ago, I discovered that the length of the filenames for jpg files that I was loading onto a memory card was limiting the number of files I could load. When I changed the length of the filenames from 6-8 characters to 3, it greatly increased the number of files I could load. Apparently this was a limitation of the file system used on the memory card, and since it was a standard sd or cf card (I don't remember at this point) you may be running into the same problem here, of course assuming that you haven't simply exceeded the storage capacity on the Droid's stock msd card.

EDIT: I did a little checking. The msd card uses the FAT32 file system. A FAT32 directory can have 65,536 directory entries. Each file and subdirectory takes from two to thirteen entries, depending on the length of its name, so those entries can disappear long before you think you've used them all up.

FAT Filenames


.

[bastosero]

I would first recommend for you to reformat it to NTFS instead of FAT32. Then, plug it into a computer and check the amount of space that's available again.

FAT32 format limits the size of each file you put into a disk, NTFS doesn't.

[bastosero]

FAT32 is only good if you're going to store a lot of pictures that aren't too big in size on your disk. NTFS is good for large files such as mp3s and video files.