Feature request: configure location of music storage (Samsung Galaxy S, Droid RAZR)

[Tikitu de Jager]

This is a dupe of https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntuone-android-music/+bug/721815 but that was marked invalid because (afaics) the maintainer didn't understand the issue, and hasn't been revisited.

The Galaxy S (and presumably plenty of other higher-end smartphones, tablets etc) lets you add an extra micro-SD card for additional storage. If you do this at all, very often it's exactly so you have a nice big SD for media files. It would be great if it were possible to configure the Android Music-Client to store its downloaded tracks on that SD rather than on the "default" one.

In the case of the Galaxy S, the extra SD is called the "external sd" and mounts at /mnt/sdcard/external_sd/ . No idea if this convention is followed for other devices though. I imagine the most general option might be simply to allow the user to configure the directory where the music store will be placed.

(BTW, there doesn't seem to be a proper place for submitting feature requests; if I missed it my apologies, point the way and I'll head there instead.)

[Tikitu de Jager (tikitu)]

Aargh. "Music store" in the badly-chosen title doesn't mean the store where you buy music, it means the place where downloaded music is stored on the device. Sigh.

[Michał Karnicki (karni)]

Could you please confirm this fixes your problem? You should see external SD card in Settings > Cache location preference.

[Michał Karnicki (karni)]

Obviously, I forgot the most imporant part: http://goo.gl/yB9W7.qr

[Tikitu de Jager (tikitu)]

Confirmed (Samsung Galaxy S): the option shows in settings and when it's turned on the tracks indeed get stored to the external sd. Thanks!

(Also may I say that this way of getting the patched app for testing rocks: totally painless. Impressed.)

[Michał Karnicki (karni)]

Awesome! Thanks for testing :)

[AureusZ (aureussz)]

It's awesome, I have marked my report as a dupe of this one.

Thank you very much, this option is just saving me, I can now really use the app.

[John A. Barbuto (jbarbuto)]

This isn't working with the Droid RAZR Maxx, unfortunately. It keeps its external SD on /mnt/sdcard-ext -- could that have something to do with it?

[Michał Karnicki (karni)]

Yup John, thanks for reporting. I'll reopen this bug, so we can include Droid RAZR specific mount point :)

[Michał Karnicki (karni)]

John, if you gave the correct path (/mnt/sdcard-ext), please give this a try and let me know if it worked for you.

URL: http://goo.gl/me2Nr
QR: http://goo.gl/me2Nr.qr

[John A. Barbuto (jbarbuto)]

The app was crashing on startup. Due to theft, I don't have the phone on me to give the exact error message and likely won't for another week at least.

[Michał Karnicki (karni)]

Sorry to hear that John.. :(

[John A. Barbuto (jbarbuto)]

Thanks, at least I had insurance. :) I'm getting a force close right after startup:

"Sorry! The application Ubuntu One Music (process.net.sourceforge.subsonic.u1m) has stopped unexpectedly. Please try again."

[Matt Fischer (mfisch)]

I have a Moto Droid Razr with an external SD card that I'd love to test this on. Right now the storage location option is greyed out. I tried the URL you posted above and the link is dead. Can you upload a new version and ping me when it's up (I'll also subscribe to this bug)

[Jason Kennaly (jkennaly)]

I also have this issue with a Galaxy S3. The external SD card is mounted at /mnt/external_sd. The option to change it is grayed out. It is painful trying to manage the 8GB free on the internal card while I have over 60GB free on the external card.

Allowing the user to type in their own path here would make this already excellent app outstanding.

[davidnottingham (david-hill-home)]

I'm having the same issue. Has there been any progress on this, given that more and more people will be using external storage for music etc?

[Michał Karnicki (karni)]

Hi folks. We're working on the next version of the music app, which will incorporate this feature. I'm sorry the response time is long, there's only one of me on the Ubuntu One team working on our Android apps. Rest assured, I want to get the v2 version as soon as possible. Our designers are slightly busy though, so we may block a few weeks on this..

[Jason Kennaly (jkennaly)]

Thank you very much for responding to our concerns.

Is there anything I could do to help? Just for background, I am an
industrial control systems engineer, and have done programming in an
industrial environment for many years, but mostly in languages and
environments that have nothing to do with the consumer/commercial world.
You say you're the only working on this aspect of the project, and if you
think I can help, I would like to.

I've written a couple of applications in C, built a couple of websites
based on PHP/HTML/CSS, and I've learned so many different programming
languages that picking up new ones is pretty simple. I've never built an
Android application, but I did build one for my much-beloved WebOS Palm
Pre. I've written a ton of scripts for my Ubuntu machine to automate
things. In my day job in the industrial world, I've written programs that
control assembly lines, pharmaceutical fermentation lines, historical data
collection and display, operator interfaces,and countless other projects
that I can't think of at the moment. My current project is programming a
controller at a BMW plant that will operate six conveyors to position a car
in place for a robot to apply PVC sealant to the seams to ensure that the
car does not leak.

Because of my current employment status, I am specifically not allowed to
do this kind of work for pay. I have never worked on any type of public
open source project before, so i have literally no idea how they are
structured. Whenever I have looked at contributing to a project like this,
I've never even been able to figure out what the people working on the
project mean, with words like commit and others that I can't think of.

So, if you think I could help, in an unpaid, volunteer status, I'd like to.
I learn quickly, and if you could assign me a low-priority aspect of the
project to work on, we could both see if I am able to make a meaningful
contribution or not.

Anyway, thanks for the great work you've done so far on the app, and for
responding to our concerns, and good luck with its further development.

On Fri, Jan 4, 2013 at 10:11 AM, Michał Karnicki <
<email address hidden>> wrote:

> Hi folks. We're working on the next version of the music app, which will
> incorporate this feature. I'm sorry the response time is long, there's
> only one of me on the Ubuntu One team working on our Android apps. Rest
> assured, I want to get the v2 version as soon as possible. Our designers
> are slightly busy though, so we may block a few weeks on this..
>
> --
> You received this bug notification because you are subscribed to the bug
> report.
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/872847
>
> Title:
> Feature request: configure location of music storage (Samsung Galaxy
> S, Droid RAZR)
>
> Status in Ubuntu One Music for Android:
> Triaged
>
> Bug description:
> This is a dupe of https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntuone-android-
> music/+bug/721815 but that was marked invalid because (afaics) the
> maintainer didn't understand the issue, and hasn't been revisited.
>
> The Galaxy S (and presumably plenty of other higher-end smartphones,
> tablets etc) lets you add an extra micro-SD card for additional...

[Michał Karnicki (karni)]

Hi Jason,

I am impressed with the variety of work you've done as a programmer. I was pleased to read your comment. All Ubuntu One clients are open source (so, practically, anyone can contribute). Regarding:

"Whenever I have looked at contributing to a project like this,
I've never even been able to figure out what the people working on the
project mean, with words like commit and others that I can't think of."

it really depends on the projects and how they're set up :) I do our best to build our projects with a single command, if the environment is properly configured (Android SDK is installed in this case). We use bzr (bazaar) as our source revision system.

"So, if you think I could help, in an unpaid, volunteer status, I'd like to.
I learn quickly, and if you could assign me a low-priority aspect of the
project to work on, we could both see if I am able to make a meaningful
contribution or not."

I would love to accept contributions. However, they do sometimes require time and effort to introduce somebody to the project. I am _very_ sorry to tell you that at this point in time I just can't spend time on that (developing v2 of the music app, but looks like I have to spend some time on the files app now, too), but you are encouraged to install bazaar (bzr), and look at Ubutnu One Music source code, if you'd like that:
$ bzr branch lp:ubuntuone-android-music u1m-v1
will pull the source into u1m-v1 directory
$ bzr branch lp:ubuntuone-android-music/v2 u1m-v2
will pull the development version of the version 2 of the app into u1m-v2 directory

What we could use is research how to collect all those custom mount points from different vendors. I'm aware one could try processing the /etc/fstab, but it's a dirty way of doing this. For what its worth, I would prefer to list possible mount points for the user (if they exist on the device) in the v2 of the app, but also allow manual entry of the path, in case we don't provide that custom path on the list. If the user chooses to manually insert a path, we could collect that info with google analytics, and include the custom mount point in the next version of the app :)

I believe these would be some of the known mount points:
/mnt/sdcard
(/storage/sdcard0 on Galaxy Nexus points to /mnt/sdcard, or vice versa)
/mnt/sdcard-ext
/mnt/external_sd
/mnt/ext-sd (?)
and probably at least few more.

*** TO ALL ***

If you see your vendor-custom mount point not listed above, please leave a comment with the full path of the larger storage on your device. Thanks!

[Michał Karnicki (karni)]

Bumping importance for v2 client implementation.

[zberra (zberra)]

Hi!

I have the same issue on a LG-E400. Just downloaded the Android music app to give the streaming a try. By default the app is using the internal memory, only 1GB on this device, which makes the cache function practically unusable. I hope there will be an update for this app soon.

The mount point for the external sd-card on the LG-400 device is:

/mnt/sdcard/_ExternalSD

[Mark Dwyer (mdwy62)]

For Jelly Bean on the Samsung GSII (Epic Touch 4G) the external SD mount point is /mnt/extSdCard.

[Matthew Bassett (hewbass)]

For Jelly Bean 4.1.2 on Samsung Galaxy S3 the file manager shows it as /storage/extSdCard

[Paul D Smyth (pauldsmyth)]

I have the same issue with the mount point selection being greyed out on the Motorola Razr i. This makes the app totally useless. Can we not have a simple fix that allows us to manually specify a mount point?