[taivlam]

I'd like to get the gist of what sort of SD cards or microSD cards that Tangara users plan to use.

Of course, SD cards and microSD cards are the de facto storage card format used by Tangara on the board level; but I was wondering if users get a full SD card, or will use a microSD card with SD card adapter.

For options from in-person stores, I see capacities of 1TB in microSD card form, but I only see a typical max of 128GB in full SD card form (or sometimes even 512GB).

I know that there are more options online (which are trust enough as sources for the average person) to get 1TB SD cards, but I was doing a quick look into what was available to me in my area's stores.  (The average person doesn't have to be concerned about MITM attacks and similar vulnerabilities from SD cards.)

Apparently the world's first available consumer 2TB microSD card was announced in January 2024, but somehow 2TB full sized SD cards are nowhere to be seen yet.

I typically don't care too much for numerical benchmarking values generally in tech, but I am curious if choosing between a microSD or SD card would make a difference regarding speed on the Tangara during "daily use", once all music is loaded onto Tangara's storage.  I want to say it shouldn't matter significantly, as I don't think Tangara would perform enough read/write operations onto storage to be significantly noticeable - though I'd like to know what others think.

[rdsh]

I can't speak for how Tangara is going to work, but generally there is no difference in performance between microSD and full sized SD. There is no processing involved in the adapter or anything, it's just passing through electricity.

So I plan to use microSD, as I have a couple of spares lying around.

[jacqueline]

Tangara doesn't use a particularly high-speed mode of accessing the SD card, so any old card you can find will probably work fine! There's not really that much difference between full-size and micro sd cards; internally they're all much the same.

The SD card slot we're using on the device is full size mostly just because I think full size slots are a lot better for various non-technical reasons. e.g. most laptops with sd slots are also full size, so by matching that it's fast and easy to transfer a lot of music just by physically removing the card from Tangara; no extra adapter needed.

[fennecs]

i guess my question on this topic is whether the Tangara software will support exFAT, which in my understanding all SDXC cards come preformatted with. it at least used to be microsoft-proprietary but it might be free-er now? maybe? unsure

it's possible to just reformat larger cards with FAT32 too, but they might not work out of the box in the case exFAT isnt supported

(edit) ah, nevermind, i see the documentation says exFAT is fine

[taivlam]

Tangara doesn't use a particularly high-speed mode of accessing the SD card, so any old card you can find will probably work fine! There's not really that much difference between full-size and micro sd cards; internally they're all much the same.

The SD card slot we're using on the device is full size mostly just because I think full size slots are a lot better for various non-technical reasons. e.g. most laptops with sd slots are also full size, so by matching that it's fast and easy to transfer a lot of music just by physically removing the card from Tangara; no extra adapter needed.

Thank you for the reply!  I think I will buy a microSD card and use a full-size SD card converter, if I buy a new card.  Just like how a 11th-gen Kindle Paperwhite with 32 GB of storage has a relatively giant capacity compared to the sizes of most locally loaded e-books (enough to go live in the woods and never come back), a 1TB would probably contain more music (and probably even long podcast episodes - though I'm not sure if/how Tangara will handle downloaded podcast episodes?) for me to listen to for the rest of my life. New microSD card at 512GB-1TB in my area would offer me the highest GB to price ratio in microSD form, compared to full-sized SD.

I was thinking of just using a USB-based SD card reader (something like this), as the newer ThinkPads models tend to have their historically customary full-size SD card slots replaced with microSD, or their customary microSD card slot being completely removed.  Framework has a microSD expansion card, but its full-sized SD card expansion card is currently in development.

[br_en_d_an_]

I joined the preorder yesterday. I’ve been travelling a lot the last month and decided to try and only travel with my phone. I didn’t have cellular data or a strong enough Internet connection most the time and I ended up listening to the music and podcasts I had stored locally very quickly. I usually bring along an iPod or two, but travelling on public transit and lots of small planes… Bluetooth ended up being a better solution for those down times when I wanted a quick song or audiobook.

But, I digress, I’ve ordered a SanDisk 1TB Extreme PRO SDXC UHS-I for my Tangara. I know it’s overkill, but I figured I can use it for my camera or another device to transfer data if needed. It was least expensive option at 200$ CAD for a full-sized SD card. I always seem to need more SD cards and USB thumb drives. I know I’ll find a use for it. The microSD variants seem to be less expensive but I prefer a full-size for devices that support them. Sandisk has a 1.5Tb microsd now too. So they’re will be lots of options.

[jacqueline]

Maybe I just have a teensy little collection, but I've been doing just fine with 32 and 64 gig cards in my dev units. It turns out you can fit a lot of music in not that much space; especially with Opus transcoding.

Looking forward to fixing all the bugs that show up when folks start throwing collections 10x the size of mine at their units 😅

[gkr]

For references, I have 138h of music on my computer at the moment, mostly encoded as ogg vorbis (default bandcamp settings) and it use a bit less than 12Gb of disk space. I can get 2 Sandisk microsd for 20 bucks (SDSQUA4-032G-GN6MT). Each card could hold like 3 times my entier collection or 2 weeks of music non-stop.

[taivlam]

We'll see what happens (especially w.r.t. bugs) when I start offloading music (save as FLAC, mostly from Bandcamp) from my smartphone/laptop into my Tangara...

[TheCraiggers]

Tangara doesn't use a particularly high-speed mode of accessing the SD card, so any old card you can find will probably work fine! There's not really that much difference between full-size and micro sd cards; internally they're all much the same.

The SD card slot we're using on the device is full size mostly just because I think full size slots are a lot better for various non-technical reasons. e.g. most laptops with sd slots are also full size, so by matching that it's fast and easy to transfer a lot of music just by physically removing the card from Tangara; no extra adapter needed.

I had an old 4GB micro sd laying around. Class 4. Probably can't even buy anything this slow any longer.

My experience was pretty horrible. DB creation took a long time (probably at least 5 mins) but more interestingly the UI was laggy to the point it affected my experience. My suspicion is that DB access never really stopped in the background, but I'm not sure.

Either way, just a heads up that there *does* seem to be a lower limit.

[momoninja]

I had an old 4GB micro sd laying around. Class 4. Probably can't even buy anything this slow any longer.

My experience was pretty horrible. DB creation took a long time (probably at least 5 mins) but more interestingly the UI was laggy to the point it affected my experience. My suspicion is that DB access never really stopped in the background, but I'm not sure.

Either way, just a heads up that there *does* seem to be a lower limit.

I am using a 512GB Sandisk MicroSDXC Extreme PRO R200/W140. That one is really fast. But for 300GB music it takes about an hour to index the database. When the database indexes music stutters during play. So I turned of automatically updating the database. I only reindex the database, when I add music.

[REDMAX431]

I decided to go with the full size SD card for ease of directly plugging between laptop and Tangara. I've got a SanDisk 512GB Extreme PRO SDXC UHS-I card on order. I'll update here on how it goes when I get the music loaded.

$ beet stats
Tracks: 11537
Total time: 7.3 weeks
Approximate total size: 269.4 GiB
Artists: 1612
Albums: 927
Album artists: 452

I have a bunch of the library as FLAC and some as high sample rate / bit-depth. Looking forward to experimenting with how it works to carry around the full catalog of lossless stuff or if it'll end up being better to just create proxy media for this.

[momoninja]

$ beet stats
Tracks: 11537
Total time: 7.3 weeks
Approximate total size: 269.4 GiB
Artists: 1612
Albums: 927
Album artists: 452

300GB was an upper bound estimate. Your songs seem to be a lot longer than mine. Our numbers are otherwise very similar. Is it classical music that you listen to? Or do you have podcasts in that list as well?

Tracks: 11023
Total time: 4.3 weeks
Approximate total size: 263.2 GiB
Artists: 1268
Albums: 960
Album artists: 582