Getting a 64GB Card to work Properly with the S3

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Sirandar

Member
Jan 16, 2011
38
15
Samsung Galaxy S3 Canadian 747 Version and 64GB microSD cards.

New Information: It seems that the S3 on 4.1.1 has issues with both 32 and 64GB cards when you allow "mediaserver" to catalog a complex library. Any card you use for music with the S3 has to be formatted FAT32 and has to have a .nomedia file to prevent Mediaserver form cataloging it. This information comes from 2 independent Galaxy S3s on 2 networks. I currently have a Sandisk 64GB card in my S3 and have been using it for a month without the slightest issue since I formatted FAT32 and prevented cataloging with a .nomedia file.

Summary 1: 64GB cards are currently a bag of hurt ......IMO on Jelly Bean 4.1.1 the Samsung Galaxy S3 does not properly support many 64GB cards. Don't buy them unless you can return and don't waste your time trying to get them to work if they generate any errors(they will only get worse). There seems to be more than 1 problem also .... one is that hard use seems to corrupt some cards and mediaserver also corrupts the card.

Summary 2: Tried Kingston 64GB Class 10 card (SDCX10/64GB) card in may hands it was unstable in this phone either because I got a bad one or due to incompatibility. Wasn't about to try another one.

Summary 3: I tested a 64GB SanDisk microSD card formatted FAT32 and it passed all the stress tests and gave no errors even with the card full of music and repeated switching/manipulations of files on both the phone and the PC. No dismounts,no scandisk errors, no Android mount checking messages.


Hello All ...... Here is how I got a 64GB card to work in the Samsung Galaxy S3 747. It worked for me but may or may not work for you so make sure you can return any card you buy because it is common to have issues.

NOTE1: The S3 does not support exFAT, the format that both Windows 7 and the S3 defaults to when formatting. The exFAT format may appear to work but sooner or later your card won't mount properly on your phone. The card must be formatted FAT32 for Android 4.1.1 (Check other posts on how to do this)

NOTE2: The Samsung default player and the Mediaserver App are buggy pieces of crap for large libraries ... Use PowerAmp media player instead from the play store.

NOTE 3:If you have messed about with exFAT and syncing using a Media Player Program you need to format your card FAT32 on your computer AND remove the offending software and shut down your computer and restart it.

1) First you need to have a look at what you are using to read your microSD card on your PC and if it is more than a year old you should probably throw it out or remember to never put your 64GB card in it. With the right SD card reader you can also take the card out of the phone and transfer directly using the reader but it may not work.

2) If you have programs intercepting your USB mass storage connections on your PC, you need to disable them .... The program I use for music is Media Monkey 4 and if you have the MM4 mass storage sync addins active, not only will you not be able to sync with MM4, you will not be able to transfer files to your phone by any method until all the Mass Storage Hooks are removed. Other program like ITunes may or may not have similar issues. This is important because these programs and hooks can actually render the card inoperable. Media Monkey for example will try to sync the tag track name instead of the actual name to microSD and this can result in improper characters and path lengths in created files that can destroy the card.

3) It is best to just take the card out of the phone and copy all your tracks direct to the card using Windows 7. Make sure you have a current reader that supports 64GB. The sad take home message is that you won't be able to sync using a media file manager but with 64GB of storage you probably don't need to anyway, Just copy your whole library over and forget about it until you get new tracks.

4) Create a directory called Music on your SD card and create or copy a file called .nomedia to that directory. This is required because the Android program Mediaserver will try to catalog this directory if you don't and mediaserver is buggy with music files. This means the Samsung Music Player App won't see your tracks and you will have to use PowerAmp to play tracks (Samsung player is actually pretty good but PowerAmp is better anyway)

5) Copy all your tracks using Windows 7 and a card reader. It is way faster than MTP anyway. Check that the files are there then "Safely remove hardware" the card, remove, and re-insert. If you get errors just take the card back to the store.... don't waste your time (unless you aren't sure about your reader) Run chkdsk (without fix option). If you have errors just take the card back to the store.... don't waste any more time. "Safely remove hardware" and remove the card.

4) Put the card in the phone and carefully watch the status bar. If your card wont mount, or gives you a "checking the card" message the card will never work in your phone so just take it back to the store.. Dismount your card and remove it from the phone.

5) Reinsert the card into your card reader on your PC . If you get errors just take the card back to the store.... don't waste your time Run chkdsk (without fix option). If you have errors just take the card back to the store.... don't waste any more time. "Safely remove hardware" and remove the card and put it back into your phone..


7) If your phone gets laggy when you put the card in it means that you didn't correctly put a .nomedia file into the music directory on your microSD. The buggy mediaserver program is trying to catalog your music and it may corrupt or destroy your card if you have a big collection.

8) Open PowerAMP and do a full rescan. If your card and music are intact a full rescan of 10,000 tracks shouldn't take more than 5 min. If it does your card is struggling or you still have mediaserver trying to catalog the tracks. After catloging is finished test your media library using the PowerAmp specifically looking for albums with unknown artists or album art that doesn't load. If you know that every track has uncorrupted tags and uncorrupted album art on your computer then missing art and unknown artists mean you have a problem with FAT32, the card or your phone. Back to the store with your card, but it is really easy to have corrupt tracks in your library so check that if you like.

9) Note that with a full 64 GB card of music the PowerAmp will take up to 5 minutes to catalog your tracks and your PowerAmp will not work properly during this time AND your battery will be sucked down at an incredible rate due to 100% CPU usage. If you make the mistake of cataloging tracks with PowerAMP with mediaserver active at the same time your phone will grind to a halt and neither PowerAmp or Stock may ever finish cataloging and your battery will be sucked dry for days on end.

10) Remember to never ever stick your microSD card into any reader older than 6 months to a year .... Actually I wouldn't stick it in any reader at all for a year or 2. Writing a single file with a unsupported reader can cause corruption or wipe the entire drive.

11) Enjoy your music collection on your phone and be glad you don't have to use any of the crappy on-line music storage solutions which are SLOW, UN-CATALOGED and WiFi/Carrier DEPENDENT, and which can take weeks to upload your tracks.
 
Last edited:

diablo009

Senior Member
Apr 20, 2009
5,558
1,350
Atlanta GA
Put in the card into phone, and format from within phone. Been using a 64 GB card formatted from within phone for the last couple months with no issues, recording huge videos in full HD with no issues.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I747 using xda premium
 

njenabnit

New member
Mar 27, 2013
2
1
I had a ton of issues getting my 64gb card to work. It would error out when trying to format from the phone. I ended up have to do a deep format that took forever and then it finally showed up as working on my phone.
 

jackbatey

New member
Jul 18, 2013
3
0
Hi Guys, I'm having a slightly different problem with my 64gb micro SD in my Galaxy S3. I have tried formatting the SD card in various ways, fat32 exfat and formating it on the S3. It seems to format fine and I can create a folder on it called music. I can then copy as many songs as I like on there. It all seems to be fine until I put it back in my S3. When I then go to play the songs, it has deleted a bunch of my songs. No matter how many songs I put on the card, it seems to reduce it down to about 4gb of music.

If I then plug it back into the memory card reader, the music folder is still there as well as all of the artists folders, but the ones that have had the songs deleted have no tracks in the folders. They have just vanished?! I do not get any error messages at any point in the process.

Can anyone offer any explanation?

Cheers.

Jack
 

jivin_hipcat

Senior Member
Jan 5, 2013
186
100
Hi Guys, I'm having a slightly different problem with my 64gb micro SD in my Galaxy S3. I have tried formatting the SD card in various ways, fat32 exfat and formating it on the S3. It seems to format fine and I can create a folder on it called music. I can then copy as many songs as I like on there. It all seems to be fine until I put it back in my S3. When I then go to play the songs, it has deleted a bunch of my songs. No matter how many songs I put on the card, it seems to reduce it down to about 4gb of music.

If I then plug it back into the memory card reader, the music folder is still there as well as all of the artists folders, but the ones that have had the songs deleted have no tracks in the folders. They have just vanished?! I do not get any error messages at any point in the process.

Can anyone offer any explanation?

Cheers.

Jack




I had a ton of trouble with random corrupt and missing files with my 64Gb card. Then I used guiformat on my windows PC and formatted it from exfat to fat32. Not one single problem from then on (about 6 months of heavy use). 2 cents aimed at you to hit or miss :) good luck.

Sent by a typing monkey
 

jackbatey

New member
Jul 18, 2013
3
0
I had a ton of trouble with random corrupt and missing files with my 64Gb card. Then I used guiformat on my windows PC and formatted it from exfat to fat32. Not one single problem from then on (about 6 months of heavy use). 2 cents aimed at you to hit or miss :) good luck.

Sent by a typing monkey

Thanks for this, I will give it a go tonight!

Jack
 

jackbatey

New member
Jul 18, 2013
3
0
I had a ton of trouble with random corrupt and missing files with my 64Gb card. Then I used guiformat on my windows PC and formatted it from exfat to fat32. Not one single problem from then on (about 6 months of heavy use). 2 cents aimed at you to hit or miss :) good luck.

Sent by a typing monkey

Tried this last night. I put 8.16gb of music on the SD card, put it in my phone and not all of the songs were there. I have put the SD card back in my PC and there is now only 3.94gb of music on there?!

not good
 

lgkahn

Senior Member
Mar 26, 2010
2,324
219
londonderry
Reformatting to fat32 defeats one of the great features of xfat on the cards, namely you can put movies on over 4gig. I have used sandisk 64gb cards and they worked out of the box on 3 s3's. As a side note it sounds like media scanner is stopping on your phone and not finding all your music. If you move it back to pc are all files there.. If so check for some weird files that are breaking media scanner. If not you may have a bad or counterfit card. Did you get it from a reputable place. Also, you are not trying to put over 4g in one directory are you? You should have subdirectories under music in the normal format that windows media player writes... ie artist/album/songs. I have over 11gb of music on my daughters phone and 13.7gb on mine. How many songs does it show when you play a song under the "all songs" tab of music player? See below I have 1913 songs.

ejyjysun.jpg


Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I747 using Tapatalk 2
 
Last edited:

kamalmaharaj

New member
Nov 24, 2012
3
0
Hi Guys, I'm having a slightly different problem with my 64gb micro SD in my Galaxy S3. I have tried formatting the SD card in various ways, fat32 exfat and formating it on the S3. It seems to format fine and I can create a folder on it called music. I can then copy as many songs as I like on there. It all seems to be fine until I put it back in my S3. When I then go to play the songs, it has deleted a bunch of my songs. No matter how many songs I put on the card, it seems to reduce it down to about 4gb of music.

If I then plug it back into the memory card reader, the music folder is still there as well as all of the artists folders, but the ones that have had the songs deleted have no tracks in the folders. They have just vanished?! I do not get any error messages at any point in the process.

Can anyone offer any explanation?

Cheers.

Jack

Hey all, I'm also having this issue. I have formatted my card to Fat32, and was using it last night in poweramp with no issues, then suddenly it couldn't read files and was rescanning my library, this morning it worked but about half my music was gone. I put the sccard in the computer (I'm running mac) and I've attached the picture of what shows up, note the strange coded files...

I've tried creating a .nomedia however mac won't let me do that in house, and I've also run into problems renaming it on the phone..
 

dwstraile

New member
Sep 19, 2013
1
0
Tried this last night. I put 8.16gb of music on the SD card, put it in my phone and not all of the songs were there. I have put the SD card back in my PC and there is now only 3.94gb of music on there?!

not good

Hello: Did you ever figure your problem out? The exact same thing is happening to me. DWS
 

Sirandar

Member
Jan 16, 2011
38
15
Read the first post

I am very sorry to say that there is no way to get this to work on Android 4.1.1 except formatting FAT32 AND putting a .nonmedia file in your top level music directory and using PowerAmp. Nothing else is stable in the long term.

I haven't had one issue in almost 8 months where previously they were almost daily.

Mediaserver is a very badly written Android sys app that can't handle complex music libraries .... it is that simple.

This may be fixed in Android 4.1.2 but Google has become so sloppy these days and there are no release notes .... I am simply to scared to even try upgrading a phone that works perfectly (with tweaks)


Hello: Did you ever figure your problem out? The exact same thing is happening to me. DWS
 

milehighxr

Member
Nov 25, 2013
30
1
Ok, so I've followed all the steps, but now it seems like I'm going to have to find another workaround, or a better alarm clock app that doesn' reference the stock music player when looking for music to use as the alarm tone. So what is the workaround? Or is it safe for me to allow the stock music player to catalog the music? Kind pisses me off, because it took me half a day to fumble phuck around just getting all 9743 tunes onto this card, and to get gonemad music player to at least see the files(I still need to figure out how to get it to scan the folder with the .nomedia file in it)...

If the device is advertised as supporting a 64gb card from the factory why on earth does it take so much mental masturbation to make it work:confused:
 
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nataku199

Senior Member
Jun 30, 2013
51
5
Pittsburgh
Hi Guys, I'm having a slightly different problem with my 64gb micro SD in my Galaxy S3. I have tried formatting the SD card in various ways, fat32 exfat and formating it on the S3. It seems to format fine and I can create a folder on it called music. I can then copy as many songs as I like on there. It all seems to be fine until I put it back in my S3. When I then go to play the songs, it has deleted a bunch of my songs. No matter how many songs I put on the card, it seems to reduce it down to about 4gb of music.

If I then plug it back into the memory card reader, the music folder is still there as well as all of the artists folders, but the ones that have had the songs deleted have no tracks in the folders. They have just vanished?! I do not get any error messages at any point in the process.

Can anyone offer any explanation?

Cheers.

Jack


I'm Having the same issues with my samsung 64gb card. My Sandisk 32gb held up like a champ but this new card keeps deleting my music. I can't figure out what I'm doing differently.
 

Buckeyeken

Member
Nov 11, 2012
14
3
I will load up about 9gb's of songs and they go on ok, but when I go to play them on my NOTE 3 , some will play and others start showing up errors saying cant play that type of file . I will take the card out and look at those songs in that folder in DETAILS and notice about 100 songs now have 0's under the duration of the song but still show the size of the mp3 , however it wont even play now on the computer . Anyone know why this is happening? Is it because of the 4.4.2 KitKat update. Is there a work around ?

Also in the first part if this thread , he talks about making a .nomedia file . So how do you do that ? Is that a note file ? a renamed mp3 file ? How do I create this file and put in it my music folder?

Another suggestion was not to put over 4gb of music into one subfolder . Guess I will try that next .

I am on a Note 3 4.4.2 with a 64gb Samsung MicroSDXC UHS-I card .
 
Last edited:

Donphillipe

Senior Member
Jun 23, 2014
197
18
Also in the first part if this thread , he talks about making a .nomedia file . So how do you do that ? Is that a note file ? a renamed mp3 file ? How do I create this file and put in it my music folder?

One way to do that is open a Windows folder and right click in the white-space of the folder to create a TXT file and name it something like test.txt. Don't add anything to the file, just save it. Then go up one directory (folder) level and on the folder where the TXT file is, right click on this subfolder while holding down the SHIFT key. Select "Open command Window here". Then key in at the Windows command prompt "rename test.txt .nomedia" (without the quotes). Now close the command prompt and open the same folder with Windows explorer and you'll see you now have the .nomedia file.

P.S. I am here because I just purchased a Blu Studio 5.5s which seems (as advertized) to support a 64GB card. I was having the same problems with long named MP3 files but my problem showed up while adding a large music directory to the card while it was plugged into a cardreader in Windows 7. Toward the end of an 11GB copy I started seeing the blank folders and zero byte music files while copying to the card outside of the Android device, so I may have a flakey card. While this card is in the phone, files are copied to the SD card as expected from the Android OS and I can successfully move applications to it through the Android interface, but I can't add very much of my music collection to it before the zero byte size files and blank folders start appearing. It starts showing problems when I copy much more than 8G to the Music directory. I removed the card, backed up the Android files, then ran chkdsk /F which some say don't run and that found some bad files and supposedly fixed the disk but the last group of MP3 folders at that point turned to ghosted icons. Knowing that wouldn't do, I then reformatted the 64G as exFAT, copied all the files this time without any problem, but unfortunately the Blu would not read the card at all then, apparently not supporting exFAT. I then removed the card again and used EasUS Partition Manager on Windows 7 to format to its original Fat32, copied all the Android system files to it from a backup and still had the issues once I started again trying toy copy files when the Music directory got a bit over 8G. I am going to try it again after I order a new memory card. Ironically the card I have in it now is a Samsung.
 

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    Samsung Galaxy S3 Canadian 747 Version and 64GB microSD cards.

    New Information: It seems that the S3 on 4.1.1 has issues with both 32 and 64GB cards when you allow "mediaserver" to catalog a complex library. Any card you use for music with the S3 has to be formatted FAT32 and has to have a .nomedia file to prevent Mediaserver form cataloging it. This information comes from 2 independent Galaxy S3s on 2 networks. I currently have a Sandisk 64GB card in my S3 and have been using it for a month without the slightest issue since I formatted FAT32 and prevented cataloging with a .nomedia file.

    Summary 1: 64GB cards are currently a bag of hurt ......IMO on Jelly Bean 4.1.1 the Samsung Galaxy S3 does not properly support many 64GB cards. Don't buy them unless you can return and don't waste your time trying to get them to work if they generate any errors(they will only get worse). There seems to be more than 1 problem also .... one is that hard use seems to corrupt some cards and mediaserver also corrupts the card.

    Summary 2: Tried Kingston 64GB Class 10 card (SDCX10/64GB) card in may hands it was unstable in this phone either because I got a bad one or due to incompatibility. Wasn't about to try another one.

    Summary 3: I tested a 64GB SanDisk microSD card formatted FAT32 and it passed all the stress tests and gave no errors even with the card full of music and repeated switching/manipulations of files on both the phone and the PC. No dismounts,no scandisk errors, no Android mount checking messages.


    Hello All ...... Here is how I got a 64GB card to work in the Samsung Galaxy S3 747. It worked for me but may or may not work for you so make sure you can return any card you buy because it is common to have issues.

    NOTE1: The S3 does not support exFAT, the format that both Windows 7 and the S3 defaults to when formatting. The exFAT format may appear to work but sooner or later your card won't mount properly on your phone. The card must be formatted FAT32 for Android 4.1.1 (Check other posts on how to do this)

    NOTE2: The Samsung default player and the Mediaserver App are buggy pieces of crap for large libraries ... Use PowerAmp media player instead from the play store.

    NOTE 3:If you have messed about with exFAT and syncing using a Media Player Program you need to format your card FAT32 on your computer AND remove the offending software and shut down your computer and restart it.

    1) First you need to have a look at what you are using to read your microSD card on your PC and if it is more than a year old you should probably throw it out or remember to never put your 64GB card in it. With the right SD card reader you can also take the card out of the phone and transfer directly using the reader but it may not work.

    2) If you have programs intercepting your USB mass storage connections on your PC, you need to disable them .... The program I use for music is Media Monkey 4 and if you have the MM4 mass storage sync addins active, not only will you not be able to sync with MM4, you will not be able to transfer files to your phone by any method until all the Mass Storage Hooks are removed. Other program like ITunes may or may not have similar issues. This is important because these programs and hooks can actually render the card inoperable. Media Monkey for example will try to sync the tag track name instead of the actual name to microSD and this can result in improper characters and path lengths in created files that can destroy the card.

    3) It is best to just take the card out of the phone and copy all your tracks direct to the card using Windows 7. Make sure you have a current reader that supports 64GB. The sad take home message is that you won't be able to sync using a media file manager but with 64GB of storage you probably don't need to anyway, Just copy your whole library over and forget about it until you get new tracks.

    4) Create a directory called Music on your SD card and create or copy a file called .nomedia to that directory. This is required because the Android program Mediaserver will try to catalog this directory if you don't and mediaserver is buggy with music files. This means the Samsung Music Player App won't see your tracks and you will have to use PowerAmp to play tracks (Samsung player is actually pretty good but PowerAmp is better anyway)

    5) Copy all your tracks using Windows 7 and a card reader. It is way faster than MTP anyway. Check that the files are there then "Safely remove hardware" the card, remove, and re-insert. If you get errors just take the card back to the store.... don't waste your time (unless you aren't sure about your reader) Run chkdsk (without fix option). If you have errors just take the card back to the store.... don't waste any more time. "Safely remove hardware" and remove the card.

    4) Put the card in the phone and carefully watch the status bar. If your card wont mount, or gives you a "checking the card" message the card will never work in your phone so just take it back to the store.. Dismount your card and remove it from the phone.

    5) Reinsert the card into your card reader on your PC . If you get errors just take the card back to the store.... don't waste your time Run chkdsk (without fix option). If you have errors just take the card back to the store.... don't waste any more time. "Safely remove hardware" and remove the card and put it back into your phone..


    7) If your phone gets laggy when you put the card in it means that you didn't correctly put a .nomedia file into the music directory on your microSD. The buggy mediaserver program is trying to catalog your music and it may corrupt or destroy your card if you have a big collection.

    8) Open PowerAMP and do a full rescan. If your card and music are intact a full rescan of 10,000 tracks shouldn't take more than 5 min. If it does your card is struggling or you still have mediaserver trying to catalog the tracks. After catloging is finished test your media library using the PowerAmp specifically looking for albums with unknown artists or album art that doesn't load. If you know that every track has uncorrupted tags and uncorrupted album art on your computer then missing art and unknown artists mean you have a problem with FAT32, the card or your phone. Back to the store with your card, but it is really easy to have corrupt tracks in your library so check that if you like.

    9) Note that with a full 64 GB card of music the PowerAmp will take up to 5 minutes to catalog your tracks and your PowerAmp will not work properly during this time AND your battery will be sucked down at an incredible rate due to 100% CPU usage. If you make the mistake of cataloging tracks with PowerAMP with mediaserver active at the same time your phone will grind to a halt and neither PowerAmp or Stock may ever finish cataloging and your battery will be sucked dry for days on end.

    10) Remember to never ever stick your microSD card into any reader older than 6 months to a year .... Actually I wouldn't stick it in any reader at all for a year or 2. Writing a single file with a unsupported reader can cause corruption or wipe the entire drive.

    11) Enjoy your music collection on your phone and be glad you don't have to use any of the crappy on-line music storage solutions which are SLOW, UN-CATALOGED and WiFi/Carrier DEPENDENT, and which can take weeks to upload your tracks.
    1
    Ok, so I've followed all the steps, but now it seems like I'm going to have to find another workaround, or a better alarm clock app that doesn' reference the stock music player when looking for music to use as the alarm tone. So what is the workaround? Or is it safe for me to allow the stock music player to catalog the music? Kind pisses me off, because it took me half a day to fumble phuck around just getting all 9743 tunes onto this card, and to get gonemad music player to at least see the files(I still need to figure out how to get it to scan the folder with the .nomedia file in it)...

    If the device is advertised as supporting a 64gb card from the factory why on earth does it take so much mental masturbation to make it work:confused: