[villain]

hello! just got my tangara and i'm excited to get my library onto it, but i'm having problems putting anything on it in the first place. i bought an (admittedly budget) 2TB SD card to use with it, but i'm not seeing any kind of external storage device show up when plugged in via USB to my mac. what's the problem here? do i need to get an external SD card reader, or is the issue with the card itself lacking compatibility with the tangara (or have i stupidly bought a dud product lol)? i've not used SD cards with this computer before but it looks like it should show up in Disc Utility, which it isn't.

i have of course enabled USB storage, and have the tangara turned on.

the USB cable works as far as i know, it's charging the tangara from my mac's port at least, and i've stuck the SD in my phone to check it and it reads on that fine and does indeed say its 2TB.
i'm running mac os sonoma 14.6.1 on a 2018 mac mini. i've attached a pic of the SD card and adapter.
   

[Be]

First, if you just got your Tangara, ensure it's running the latest firmware.

Regardless, if you have a music library big enough to get a 2 TB SD card, I don't recommend using the Tangara as a card reader to copy your music onto the card because it's extremely slow. When I measured read speeds on my Tangara versus a USB SD card reader on my laptop, the card reader was 10,000 times faster.

[villain]

First, if you just got your Tangara, ensure it's running the latest firmware.

Regardless, if you have a music library big enough to get a 2 TB SD card, I don't recommend using the Tangara as a card reader to copy your music onto the card because it's extremely slow. When I measured read speeds on my Tangara versus a USB SD card reader on my laptop, the card reader was 10,000 times faster.

okay, i've updated the firmware just now to tangarafw-v1.3.1.tra using the companion application. this hasn't made any difference to my problem unfortunately.

i figured this would be a very slow option, but i wanted to test the sd worked at all before buying another thing to populate my desk drawer as i wasn't expecting to put everything on at once.

[ailurux]

Yeah, USB mass storage mode isn't a great option for large transfers, you'll be much better off transferring them directly to the SD card using a computer and adapter. We are aware of a number of issues people have with mounting USB storage at the moment, but haven't had the time with assembly going on to really address them, so it's probably best to not rely on it until those issues get addressed.

[villain]

Update - the SD reader fixed this issue, but I also definitely got scammed with a dud SD card too. Embarrassing... I'm up and running now though, thanks for the replies!

[Be]

Update - the SD reader fixed this issue, but I also definitely got scammed with a dud SD card too. Embarrassing... I'm up and running now though, thanks for the replies!

Sadly fraudulent SD cards are out there that report their capacity incorrectly and corrupt data when you write more than their real capacity. If it's too cheap to be true, it's likely fraudulent.