ZTE Z740/AT&T Radiant music on SD

[jps286]

I'm having an issue with my Z740/radiant where it plays music fine from internal memory, but it won't from the SD card. I've used both the default music app ("Music") and Jetaudio Basic, and neither finds any music files on the SD card. Jet Audio doesn't even appear to see the card when I click on the file tab in the app. The default player doesn't appear to have a folder icon I can click on in the app to browse for files.

The files are visible from a file manager app I have. I can click on the files from the file manager and bring up the default music player (choosing from the list of apps that pops up), and the file plays. If I try to do the same thing with JetAudio, the app briefly comes up, but bounces back to the file manager before playback starts.

I tried to clear the app data for both apps to force music rescan, and that didn't help.

This SD card appears to play well with the phone in other respects. Apps run from it fine. Is there a way to evaluate that further?

Unfortunately, this phone has such limited internal memory to start with that it is basically useless as an audio player unless I can get the SD card to work for audio.

EDIT: This phone has Android 4.2.1.

 

[jps286]

Made some progress tonight after much searching and tinkering. First, I found that I had a .nomedia file in the root directory of my sd card. Before making changes, I unmounted it, backed it up to my desktop via a card reader, deleted that file, and remounted it. After that, all three audio player apps on the phone would play audio files selected using the file manager. (Not sure if that was due to deleting .nomedia or just unmounting/mounting the card - maybe the latter is more likely). However, I still couldn't see any files in the library of any of the three players.

JetAudioBasic has an option to rebuild the library from a specified directory. From there, I was able to see and specify the music folder on the sd card. It appeared to be thinking about doing something when I clicked OK, but no new files appeared in the library.

Then I downloaded an sd card scanner app. It scanned the card, and I could see it listing some of the audio files as it showed scanning progress. But no new audio files appeared in any of the libraries.

Finally, not knowing what else to do, I just downloaded a new audio player, PowerAmp (free trial version). It found all my audio files, on both internal memory and sd card. Everything plays fine.

I'm still wondering why this happened. And I'm curious as to whether it will happen again if I sync more music to the card (maybe the new music won't show up). I'll try that later in the week and see what happens....

 

[jps286]

I can see I'm just having a conversation with myself here, but I'll keep going in case it helps someone else.

Last night I synced a couple more albums of mp3s to the sd card. They showed up in the new PowerAmp app right away, as well as the two pre-existing audio players on the phone. But only those two albums are showing up on the pre-existing apps. Now I suspect that I could delete and re-sync the missing audio files and they would then show up. However, everything plays nicely in PowerAmp, so I'm not going to worry about it for now. Maybe when the free PowerAmp trial runs out in a couple weeks....