Music on mini SD card not working properly

[shaolinn]

I bought a Galaxy Tab 2 10.1 a few months back along with a SanDisk UHS Speed Class 64GB mini SD card.I am aware the Samsung device is not capable of the UHS transfer speed and simply runs it under class 10 speeds. I keep my music database stored under the external SD card and have not had any problems with up until now. With both the included music player or power amp after a while of playing music suddenly a message appears "This file is not found....", although the SD card has not unmounted itself and is still shown as active under settings > storage. It seems to be behaving as if it is unmounted. The only way I found to resolve the issue by unmounting and remounting the SD card. However, this is a rather annoying process as the music players will have to rescan the 10GB + music database which takes some time. Also on occasion after unmounting it will give an error "This SD card is empty or corrupted..." when remounting it and will only succeed on the second attempt. As a result it creates a LOST.DIR and moves many files (at least 1200 songs) out of the music directory into this one creating a further nuisance.I am using Windows 7 and therefore had to use fat32format.exe with command prompt to format the SD card into fat32 to make it readable on the tablet, since windows 7 doesn't allow formatting of SD cards through it's included formatting utility. To transfer my music database into the SD card I then used Mediamonkey with my tablet plugged into the pc with USB and the card mounted in it. This is my third time formatting the SD card and transferring the entire music database with this problem reoccurring.

In conclusion I assume something went wrong in the following:

1. Fat32format.exe is insufficient due to lack of advanced settings and formatted the SD card incorrectly causing an error.
   
2. SD card should be connected directly into the SD card reader instead of mounted in the tablet and connecting it to the PC through USB.
   
3. Mediamonkey is creating the error.

I have tried to include as many details as possible and outline everything clearly so experienced users do not need to ask for any additional information to identify what went wrong. Hopefully this was successful. I have considered putting the entire database into internal storage to fix this; however, would still prefer using external if possible. I would greatly appreciate any help given to find a fix or workaround and thank you for offering your time in advance.

 

[woodworthjohnca]

I've had minor problems with a similar situation with the Tab 2 10.1. They have been resolved by powering off, then back on and waiting for it to reaccumulate the directory. Also, maybe the contacts on the card need cleaning. On past devices with intermittent problems with the microSD card, swapping in a new card resolved the problem.

Hope this helps.

 

[shaolinn]

Thanks for the response will give it a try and get back to you if it works. Hopefully the fix for this problem is that simple and not more complex.

 

[shaolinn]

Ok just tested it. It seems to have worked don't even have to recover anything from the LOST.DIR to the music folder as it seems to have detected the files it moved into it as well. Cheers for the help. Will give it 24 hrs to see if the problem resurfaces or not.

 

[woodworthjohnca]

Well, it was a shot in the dark. But, we all deserve a little good luck. Hope it turns out to be a permanent fix.

 

[shaolinn]

So far so good everything still working. May have been a shot in the dark but I thought of everything else but that so it's always good getting an extra set of eyes. Cheers


Edit: Knew it was too good to be true the problem has now resurfaced. When I attempt to play a song or album it now says "This file is not playable by this player" as it skips through an entire album with this error;however, after rebooting the tablet it will work perfectly again for the duration of about one album before reoccurring. One thing I did notice which is different now than it was before. When this problem occurs under Settings> Storage the SD Card is now displayed as having 0.00 GB storage space without any additional information. What does this mean? Is this a faulty SD card or is the partition somehow corrupt? Any help would be appreciated.

 

[woodworthjohnca]

Most unfortunate. It might be a defective card, or also the contacts are flaky. Try rubbing the contacts VERY gently with a rubber pencil eraser...Or, use a good liquid contact cleaner. When this doesn't work for me (once on a different device) I get a new SD card and that has worked.

 

[shaolinn]

its highly unlikely its the contacts tbh it works perfectly fine while in the SD card slot of my laptop no matter how long its plugged in. I've already cleaned it when you first responded just to be sure. I've done some reading up on similar problems and it seems android just doesn't agree with external mini SD cards with 32GB+ storage space. These posts are several months old though I'm sure Google has long since fixed this bug on a firmware update accept Samsung is usually a couple of android versions behind the latest one. Sadly I don't have allot of time after work to look into it further. The card remains mounted on the tablet without any issues until I actually try to play the music on it. Options I'm considering would be to root my tablet and install the Paragon exFAT, NTFS & HFS+ app, reformatting the card to exFAT and transferring the music back onto it. This would let me identify whether the fat32format.exe I'm using is somehow corrupting the partition of the SD card. Trial and error is exactly what I'm trying to avoid tho. Which leaves me with transferring my music onto the internal storage so I can at least listen to my music when i feel like relaxing instead dealing with this error every time be it a hardware or software issue.

 

[Dave Le Huray]

This is interesting! I have just obtained a tab2 16gb wifi and am also having ghis problem. I originally thought it was an sdcard problem but the card works fine in my galaxy s phone. Then I wondered if it was a problem with the sdcard holder in the tab, perhaps the card wasnt sitting securely. I will keep my eye on this.

I also have a problem syncing the tab with my music players in Linux but I'll start another thread for that.

Rgds
Dave Le Huray
Guernsey

 

[shaolinn]

I managed to fix mine this weekend since I had a little more time on my hands. I'll run you through the steps I followed. Keep in mind all these steps must be done while having the mini SD card directly mounted into your computers on board SD card reader.

1. Download and install SD Formatter 4.0 which can be found Here
2. In options under Format Type select Full (Overwrite) and leave Format Size Adjustment Off (This will take some time as it will overwrite every cluster on your SD card)
3. Download and install fat32format.exe . And follow the instructions found Here

Now that the device will again be readable by your Tablet you can either manually transfer in your music library by creating the folder "Music" on it and transferring your database into this directory or use software to do this for you. My personal choice would be Mediamonkey as it manages your entire media library and allows syncing to any device be it a SD card or a smart phone. In addition to this it has some nice features such as album art work and tag management and all for the cost of nothing unless you decide to support them and purchase the gold version. As far as I know it's also available on all platforms and can be made to look identical to Itunes by selecting skins for it. If your are still a Itunes user there are also several pay to use 3rd party apps that allow you to sync your music and playlists directly from Itunes itself. I have decided to get rid of Itunes a while back since their updates kept messing with my album artwork which took hours to complete, but isyncr is what I used to achieve syncing between android and Itunes.

I can't say with 100% certainty what caused this issue. My two cents Samsung's MTP mode does not fully support file transfers onto a FAT32 formatted SD cards or the onboard card reader has limited capabilities when it comes to writing data onto these cards. Either way although MTP works just fine on my Samsung galaxy s II it does not for this tablet. Thus simply use your computers SD card reader directly instead of the onboard reader on the tab along with the USB wire when it comes to your music or video library. It will also yield faster transfer speeds which is a further advantage.

Regards