Please Support MP3 USB-drives!

[jwinter]

Recently I purchased a wonderful little MP3 player from Sandisk (Sansa Express) that has a socket for a MicroSD card - which if fitted with an 8 or 16GB MicroSD card makes a great little portable applications drive big enough for all the portable software, email, etc that have ever wanted to carry around. One of my favorite portable applications is XYplorer because of its portable file associations - so that I can double-click a file and have it opened by the application on the USB drive rather than by an application on the host computer.

*However*... It turns out that the USB drive - even though it has been allocated a drive letter etc, and can be explored, formatted, etc using Windows Explorer - does not even appear listed on XYplorer! This is really sad! The one application (XYplorer) that would make it really useful (with portable file associations) cannot be used with it!

It seems that the device does not appear as a traditional removable drive, but rather as an "MTP device" (Media Tranfer Protocol). Any hope of support in the future for this type of device?

[admin]

Hi!

I'm surprised. You say it has a drive letter. I'd expected it to appear in XY if it has a drive letter. XY does not support any non-drive devices. This might change in the future, but not very soon.

Don

PS: I myself have a Muvo V100 MP3 player, and use SD Cards in my Camera and my Audio Recorder. All appear as drives in XYplorer without any problem.

[jwinter]

You are right - it is not given a drive letter. I think I must have been mistaken about that. But on the computer I am using at present it also does not offer to "format" the device. So something is quite different between this computer and the one I ran it on previously while testing it - I could definitely format it from that computer!

I have some other MP3 players which definitely appear as drives - but don't accept an SD expansion card. It seems that this newish device type (MTP device) actually connects with and syncs using late versions of Windows Media Player - which the older drive types don't.

I should try XY with a couple of cameras - but for my canon one (a TX-1) I gave up using the USB cable because it didn't transfer files between camera and computer correctly using it - and after everything looked OK, and I had formatted the SDHC card from the camera, I found the files had not been copied successfully and were lost forever . So nowadays I always use a SDHC to USB adaptor dongle to do the job - which mounts as a drive and is bound to work I guess.

Anyway, looks like I'll have to manage without XY if I want to run from this little MP3 device! Thanks for responding.

[admin]

You might be able to connect those SD cards using a normal USB card reader that's not intercepted by WMP. When I last bought an SD Card, a free USB-plugin-slot for the card was included, nice!

[PeterH]

In the menu of my nikon camera I can switch USB between M = Mass storage and PTP = Picture Transfer Protocol.
For M it behaves "like a card reader", i.e. I see every file and folder - so I prefer this one.