Device boot loops with microSD cards
#1
I see a few threads here with similar issues, but not quite what I am experiencing.

When I first got my Tangara, I had a blank Samsung EVO Select 512GB microSDXC card (U3, A2, V30 rated) formatted in exFAT that I put in upon first boot. The device would start boot, hang, and reboot with a short vibration marking each time it rebooted in a cycle. It would not fully boot at all while the microSD card was inserted, and only worked when no SD card was present. The card worked perfectly fine on my desktop PC, so I added folders as suggested on the Getting Started page and some music to try to load. The card would still cause the device to boot loop. I tried several times to reformat and make folders but it would not work on the Tangara, though it would work fine on a Steam Deck.

A couple days ago I went and purchased a brand new Microcenter branded 128GB microSDXC card (U3, V30, A1 rated) for cheap and tried it on the Tangara as a blank drive. The device did fully boot with it inserted, so I figured it may have just been an incompatibility with the Samsung card. I added folders and music to try now that it was working, and I was able to listen to all of "Gates of Delirium" by Yes perfectly fine. Since I have more music than can fit on the 128GB card, I opted to take a different 512GB microSD card that I had used for my Switch (an Animal Crossing branded Sandisk 512GB microSDXC, which I can only tell is Class 10 rated), and reformatted it as exFAT and added a lot of music to it. The Tangara did boot with this third card and I was happy to see it see all of the folders show up, though it only appeared to index some of the albums when I checked the 'albums by artist' list. I tried playing some music and it would not get more than a few seconds in before rebooting.

Now this is a new issue. It does read the card but still does the boot loop when trying to play music. I tried multiple times to play different songs, stuff in FLAC and OPUS formats, and it keeps doing this. The last time I have used it so far was while writing this post, where I kept the device on idling so maybe it can index everything first, and it did stay on much longer as I played a couple of songs before it rebooted by itself. I have also updated the Tangara to version 1.3.4 using the Tangara Companion app (Windows) and it hasn't improved this issue. At the moment, the device appears unstable with these microSD cards and I'd rather not have to hunt to find a compatible microSD card if it is just down to that. Is this a known issue or something someone has found a fix for?
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#2
Hi, sorry to hear about your SD card woes. A few people have reported issues with Samsung microSD cards in particular, though we've bought some to investigate and haven't run into the issues ourselves. 

There's a number of things that could cause a crash, so it might be unrelated to the SD card. A boot loop after a crash might indicate some corruption to the filesystem or the database, especially if the crash was during a database update. If it's crashing frequently, you may want to disable the automatic database update on boot (in Settings -> Database) and run it manually whilst not playing anything, to reduce the chance of a crash during the update. 

If your music is in flac or opus, please check these tracks don't have embedded cover art, as this is a known crash bug currently affecting those formats as well. 

Also the database itself is stored on the SD card, so make sure to leave some additional room on the card for these files. They don't take up a lot of space on the card, but having a mostly full SD card can cause slow writes as well.

Hope this helps!
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