I really like Lollipop, but its cataloging back end is really clunky and causes the program to crash frequently. I think if it would let you control when you just want to import music, and when you want it doing stuff to make suggestions and playlists available, it would help not waste so much CPU and make the app far more stable.
I don’t say any of this to take away from the program or paint it in a bad light.
That said, I am curious how Museek works on the L5. My guess is, that won’t scale properly.
That is why sdcards are better to be formatted in ext4. Because if an app refuses to scan the sdcard you can always create a link from the main disk to a folder on the card and make the app think it scans the main disk.
Seemed like VLC was working ok from thread here I was reading. It certainly functions as a more than adequate music player and it’s the only music player I actually use on my spy phone.
Lollypop has been working normally and retaining the location of my music collection without problems for some time now. In Preferences, under Collection, I select Memory card then my folder named Music. In the beginning I had to repeatedly re-select the location after returning to the app, but now it seems to remember.
Mine is formatted as FAT 32.
It may be that I just wasn’t giving it enough time to do this the first few times.
I threw 8 GB at it yesterday (a fraction of my collection) and I experienced zero crashes. Happy user. Any insight into what gives it difficulty? Is it number of files? Specific metadata? Container format?
Are you using it on the Librem 5 or on a Linux laptop or?
I’m really happy with it as well. Best music player I’ve used on Linux hands down. My music collection is about 24gb. Alot of it from iTunes, unfortunately. It could be a lot of things, but I noticed that something like Museek imported the library in all of 20 seconds and Lollipop takes a good 5 minutes, during which time, the app is pretty unresponsive.
I would be reluctant to use ext3 or ext4, because the journaling will cause a large number of writes that can degrade the microSD card over time, plus writing to a microSD is slow. My recommendation is to use ext2 (which doesn’t have journaling) if you want to use symbolic links to the microSD card.
Unfortunately, at the moment, I’m experiencing a lot unexpected shutdowns, because of bad battery level indication or for no reason. So I think it’s better to have a journaling file system as a basic insurance.
Yes you are right. Ext2 will be better suited to the task after abnormal shutdowns due to battery problems are sorted out. But I have a question. Isn’t the internal disk of the phone formatted to ext4? This is what I would expect. If yes, then what about degrading the internal disk?
Kioxia doesn’t publish a datasheet for the eMMC used in the Librem 5, but most eMMC’s have some kind of wear leveling and Kioxia (formerly Toshiba) said that its eMMC controllers have wear leveling. The datasheet for a similar Kioxia model doesn’t mention wear leveling, but most wear leveling isn’t configurable, so it is unlikely to be mentioned in the manual.
MicroSD cards generally don’t have any wear leveling, although I have read that some higher-end SanDisk microSD cards do have it, but they don’t advertise it.
At any rate the eMMC in the Librem 5 (max ~400 MB/s transfer rate) should be about 10 times faster than the microSD card (max ~40 MB/s transfer rate due to USB 2.0 interface), so you are likely to notice a performance difference as well with frequent writes
on such a device mpd should be a way to go. It’s a daemon so fully complies with portable device (no need to run gui app if it is controlled via widget or smartwatch). and there are plenty of interfaces to it, from web, to qml, cli and gtk.
You can disable journaling on ext4 with the tune2fs command. If leaving it enabled, you can even have the journal on a different device (not really applicable for the Librem 5 since there isn’t really a better device to use).
For my usage there won’t be many writes. Once the card is loaded with media, it is all reads.
I have chosen to use the mount option, noatime, when mounting the uSD card, for similar reasons.
The root partition is ext4. The boot partition is ext2.
