Putting music and other media onto my A500

[Stevepup]

:questionmark::questionmark::questionmark:

I've recently updated my A500 to ICS and got the one minor issue I had come up taken care of with a factory reset. I've reinstalled all my apps. Now I'm ready to put my music and other media files onto my tablet. What would be the best way to do that? I think I used Acer Sync when I did it before the upgrade, but Acer Sync doesn't work on ICS. So, my fellow A500 users, what would you do?

 

[Mrhelper]

The first thing I did was install ES File Explorer. There are other file managers, but this is the most feature rich, most reliable, and best supported one that I have found.

You can easily use this to map network drives from your PC or other media devices. You can also use it to copy files from external media, like SD cards and USB flash.

You noted that you have used Acer Sync, so you apparently already have the Acer USB driver installed. You can copy files by just plugging in the USB cable you used for Acer Sync, and then looking in Windows explorer for the A500 internal storage. Setting USB debugging mode is not required to use this interface. The USB cable option may actually be your choice if you preferred using Acer Sync. I've seen transfer rates to the a500 over USB cable near 90-100Mb/s, and USB flash drive rates of 15-20Mb/s. USB cable rates appear to be CPU bound on the a500 because of the FUSE file system used for the user data partition (mounted on directory /sdcard). SMB rates over wifi are much slower.

I tend to move files in and out of mine using a USB flash drive because it is reasonably fast and very convenient. File transfers over wifi use SMB, which is much slower. Using SMB (mapping Windows or Samba network shares) is convenient if you have file servers or always-on PCs on your network, and you merely need a few files.

 

[Stevepup]

Well, I did some exploring and discovered I had Google Play set up on my computer, so I could access my music through the cloud. But, I want the music on my tablet's SD card so I could listen when away from wifi. So I used my USB cable and hooked my A500 up to my laptop. When I did that, my computer gave me several options. After considering the list I decided to go with using Windows Media Player to sync my music files. It is set up to find all my iTunes music. I was able to select any tracks I wanted to sync. I also was able to sync my podcasts.