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Topic: Double storage on my Android phone (Read 3721 times) previous topic - next topic
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Double storage on my Android phone

Sorry if this was already asked, or if this is the wrong forum.

I decided to get into using my phone (Moto G7)  as a playback device after my iPod Classic died. The internal storage is 65GB, with a 256GB SD card plugged in.

I can transfer files easily enough to the SD card and have foobar2000 recognize them and I can play them. The first time I tried using the phone I loaded the SD card up with about 200GB of music, and it worked until it didn't. It turns out that the music was saved both to the internal and external storage, so I used up all the free (internal) storage; it messed up the phone so I had to reset to factory default.

As an experiment I only put about 15GB on the SD card the second time around. I screwed with some foobar settings but the internal hard drive still made a copy of the music and has eaten up the 15GB on that.

I'd like to use the phone to replace my iPod, as I said: is there any way to have my music be external only? The SD card held more than the 65GB, so that works; the problem seems to be with the phone.

Re: Double storage on my Android phone

Reply #1 –
Very weird
Is the SD card known as portable storage by the phone?
TheWellTemperedComputer.com

Re: Double storage on my Android phone

Reply #2 –
External storage. The internal storage is just called "internal storage"; there's also a "foobar2000 Music Folder" but I don't know where or what that is. I've deactivated it in the Media Library but I guess it could still be having an effect? I can't find the folder in the file explorer.

Re: Double storage on my Android phone

Reply #3 –
I am using an old Samsung S5 with 16GB internal and a 64GB card, full with songs, and I am using foobar2000 mobile as the player over bluetooth on my car and haven't had such a problem in all this time.

Don't know what to suggest

Re: Double storage on my Android phone

Reply #4 –
Don't quite understand how this is happening. I have a G7 Power with a 256GB MicroSD card, using Foobar with no problems. I have used it with m4a, mp3 and mpc files with no issues at all. The SD card shows up in Foobar as External Storage. The only thing I can think of is that you are using the card as shared/internal storage and not as simply external storage.

Re: Double storage on my Android phone

Reply #5 –
Things seem to be getting better: I messed around with some settings (denied foobar2000 storage permission, though going through the settings I can't figure how to get to it) and added 2.2GB to the card with no problems so far. Still not taking it for fixed but it's a step forward, I guess. I'm using the /music folder on the card and when I turn on both that and external storage in the Media Library settings I get duplicates of everything. Scanning the same information two different ways, I guess. Anyway, fingers crossed, it might be fixed.

Re: Double storage on my Android phone

Reply #6 –
Which brings me to another problem: rock and jazz transfer just fine but oftentimes I have trouble with classical. I use MP3s where I can but sometimes the progress bar (in Windows/File Explorer when I copy and paste the tracks onto my card) will suddenly cancel on some tracks and no file appears in the folder. When this happens I just transfer the original FLAC file in its place. This usually works, but I've had both transfers fail on two tracks, meaning I can't use them at all. They're both from the St. Matthew Passion which is half secco recitative, which the two lost tracks are, but I'm concerned that some actual musical tracks might be untransferable to the SD card. I'll cross that bridge when I get there. The "bad" files are the same on my G7 as they were on the old G5; they all play fine on my computer.

Hope that's not confusing. Can clarify if anyone needs it. Thanks a bunch for the replies so far.

Re: Double storage on my Android phone

Reply #7 –
Are you transferring directly to the card in the phone via USB? or are you using an external card reader/writer? I recall having problems in the past when trying to bulk transfer a very large number of tracks directly via USB, so now I always remove the card from the phone and use the external device.

Re: Double storage on my Android phone

Reply #8 –
Usually, "external storage" in the Android world (or the path "/sdcard" ) actually refers to a folder in your internal storage device  mounted with sdcardfs (which emulates SD card file system).

Your physically removal SD card (or, secondary external storage) is mounted somewhere like /storage/xxxx-xxxx, where xxxx-xxxx is the volume id of the SD card.
You should confirm that you are actually saving your files into the latter.

Re: Double storage on my Android phone

Reply #9 –
In case of the Foobar music library, the "External Storage" actually points to the sdcard.

So the OP should use the "External Storage" as "Music folder" in Foobar.
And remove the internal storage from "Music folder".
And remove the music files from the internal storage using the file explorer.

Re: Double storage on my Android phone

Reply #10 –
I'm transferring files (MP3 when possible, original FLAC when not) from my external (computer) hard drive to the SD card with Windows Explorer (File Explorer now?) It seems to be doing better; I'm putting the files in a /music path I made on the card and it's showing up as /storage/012-345/music, as it should . I have my Media Library with only /music activated, with internal, external, and foobar2000 folders deactivated. As I said /music is a subfolder within "external storage"; when both external and /music are turned on in the Media Library I get duplicates of everything in foobar. (Not the original problem.)

However this time it doesn't seem like I'm having any problems. I put on 2GB of files into the /music folder and the free space on the phone isn't affected at all. What I think I did wrong was not realizing that some program -- don't know which one, or whether it was phone or computer -- had syncing turned on and tried to suck my whole music library onto the phone storage.

Thanks a ton for all of your help. If something does wrong I'll bring it to this thread. Does anyone have any idea about the transfer-aborting problems with certain classical albums?

Re: Double storage on my Android phone

Reply #11 –
It's hard to say. In what way are the classical albums different than the other music?
Are the files larger?
Are the foldernames and filenames longer?
Or do the filenames contain strange characters?

You can also try another usb port or another sdcard adapter.


I have a 128GB sdcard and if i use it with an old sdcard usb adapter, writing is often very slow or stops altogether. If i use a newer/better adapter it works without issues.
I also noticed that usb2 is more reliable than usb3 in general.

Re: Double storage on my Android phone

Reply #12 –
I was busy for a couple of days, sorry for the belated reply. I now have a good deal more storage used on the SD card, having added it little by little, than the total capacity of the internal memory with no problems or even any storage being taken up. So I'll consider that solved -- thank you all.

So about the classical: while transferring some rock files the transfer would abort if it encountered a particularly long file name. Shortening the name resolved that, *but* with the classical problem sometimes the aborting filename isn't very long (at the least there are longer file names out there) and, besides, I can use the FLAC files, which are the same file length, to plug the holes.

It's specific to classical. I'm into three genres (rock/pop/electronic, jazz, and classical) and the classical are the only albums giving me any trouble, no matter whether I ripped the CDs last month or ten years ago (literally). Thankfully it only seems to affect one album in eight or nine -- always varying album-by-album. I don't get it

Re: Double storage on my Android phone

Reply #13 –
I have my music library on an SD card in my Android phone, what is weird that Android created the standard folders on the SD card, even though I don't use or need them there. It also created them on an USB stick. A bug?

Re: Double storage on my Android phone

Reply #14 –
Here's a thought: the original FLAC and the created MP3 files *do* have a difference that might cause the MP3 filename be too long.

Format for FLAC files created by EAC is:

[%track%] - [%title%].flac

Format for converter output in foobar2000 is:

[%artist%] - [%album%] - [%track%] - [%title%].mp3

That could make all the difference, though it doesn't answer everything. Don't know why I didn't think of it before.

Re: Double storage on my Android phone

Reply #15 –
Changing file names to [%artist%] - [%title%] - [%track%] -- cutting out the %title% field altogether, because of course it's still in the tags -- did the trick! Just loaded on a batch of classical files without one aborted transfer.

So basically,

1) make sure nothing's syncing to your phone, especially if your used external storage exceeds your internal free space, and
2) keep your file names short.

The phone is definitely a step up from the iPod except that it's much easier to distract yourself screwing around on the internet and not actually, y'know, listening to music.

Thanks all, especially to Mark7.

Re: Double storage on my Android phone

Reply #16 –
Quote from: swtwentyman on
[...] my phone (Moto G7)  as a playback device after my iPod Classic [...]

Sorry for the off topic question but what do you think of audio quality of both those devices? Which one do you like better? What is the generation of the iPod Classic?

Re: Double storage on my Android phone

Reply #17 –
The sound quality is pretty similar. For this batch I used LAME -V2 and with the iPod I used 320 CBR but that doesn't make a whole lot of difference (at least at the time I tried it I could ABX the difference between 256kbps and 320, but you have to be actively and critically listening to the sound to tell, and I did the test in my early 20s, with early-20s ears, so you may as well save the disk space.)

The iPod Classic was the last generation, I believe. Either that (7th) or the one before it (6th), at least. It got twitchy a few times when a batch of files would get corrupted or whatever, forcing you to reformat its hard drive, but most of the time it worked great for what it was.

I'm only about a week into it but music on the (Motorola) Moto G7 is great. The SD card holds much more than even the iPod and can be salvaged if the device dies; the album art (in foobar2000) is bigger and better. Only thing I need to do still is to assign genres to the files (rock/jazz/classical -- these are separate on my computer but all thrown into the same artist-by-artist list on the phone, irrespective of genre) and delete all album artwork except for the folder.jpg containing cover art: if there are multiple image files in an album's folder sometimes it displays the one you don't want.

That brings me to another advantage of the phone: on the iPod, you have to painstakingly over many hours add album art to the files themselves; on the Android foobar2000 you can just have it use the image files that are in the same folder as the music, so basically it's done automatically.

Only downside is that it's easy to tune out and mess around with the internet -- I've had this problem badly on the computer, which is why I used the iPod so much -- but I've found that you can just turn on airplane mode and you're good to go. That solved my last problem with using the phone

Given that the iPod Classic is no longer made and hasn't been for a while, you may as well get used to music on the phone. I'm thinking of getting a 512GB SD card that would hold basically my whole collection (in MP3)  However good the iPod was, it could only hold 160GB, and with its drawbacks. (On my phone playing an album only takes about 10% off the battery, so it's good there, too.)

If any of this is unclear let me know.