Read audio from USB OTG

Question

I have a lot of music files. Far more from what my SD card + internal memory could support even if they had no apps, pictures and whatnot stored into.

I have a 128Go USB stick where I store all my music so I can listen to it on any device. However, this does not work with my Android 6.0 phone.

I mean, I can plug the stick on the device with the cable, then click onto the "USB drive" notification to see the files and then play the file I want. Problem: I want to listen to music through a proper player, which goes onto the next song when one is finished and let me browse my music in an intuitive manner.

So far I was unable to find any player that would detect music on my USB stick. I think I understood now the problem comes from OTG itself - which is made for using a DAC more than a USB stick or to store files more than play them - but I wonder if there isn't some kind of trick or workaround to get, for example, my phone to detect my USB stick as an SD card, or to make it treat the stick as internal memory (which is possible with SD cards).

My phone is not rooted for now (haven't got the time to investigate much on this) by I do have a custom recovery (TWRP) if that can help. If rooting is necessary I'll dig more into it.

Thanks for your help !

Answer 1

Well, finally, I found an app that can read music from an USB stick.

ES File Explorer

It is a file eplorer which:

1) detects USB sticks

2) comes with a simple music player with basic functions

3) can create a playlist from a specified folder

4) can do this with USB folders

While the player in itself is not exactly the most advanced one (it won't detect id3 tags on USB files, doesn't sort songs by Artist, Album or whatever else than alphabetical order) nor the most beautiful, it has all I need for listening music in the subway (which was my main goal here) i.e. making a playlist from my music folder and being able to shuffle it.

Hope it helps people who had the same problem as me.

Edit

This player has some problems. It crashes, don't detect the stick sometimes and often goes as far as restarting my phone. It does the job, but it does not do it well and the user experience is unpleasant. Therefore, if anybody has a better suggestion, please write an answer !

Answer 2

Okay so this is a pretty easy method, however it requires root. Luckily you have TWRP installed so all you have to do is flash SuperSU.zip (google for it "supersu xda") in TWRP. Once rebooted, grab a terminal emulator.

1. Type su
2. Then mkdir /sdcard/somemusic
3. Then mount -o bind /path/to/otg /sdcard/some music

You could also try StickMount in the PlayStore but I do not know if this works, it also requires root.

Answer 3

There's a solution over at XDA:

Simply open terminal and type:

su

sm set-force-adoptable true

Answer 4

If you can live with playing all the tracks of an album in your preferred predetermine order or a set of tracks like in a playlist, you could concatenate several audio tracks(files) to create single audio file.

Then, you could play the created audio file from an OTG USB drive with any audio/media app as your created file will look like a single file, but it will contain all the concatenated songs. As an example, if you have 100 tracks you could organize them into 5 or ten files. A work-around.