Ah great! And it wouldn’t change the files already there? It would only add the mounted content?
Also, I tried to copy the files (before I thought of the idea) from my USB to the zynthian directory where the wiki says it looks, but none of the programs found any soundfonts. Do I need to set permissions for the files copied?
Note that I only have some knowledge about the Linux system
Thank you
If you mount over an existing directory then you can’t access the existing files. Zynthian has a system dir and a usr dir to read soundfonts from so you could pick one of them to mount over and place the ones you want to keep in the other.
Ah i see, will try it and report back.
Thanks heaps!
Currently, automount is installed and configured in zynthian. When you plug-in a pen-drive, it should be mounted automatically on “/media/usb0”.
For getting FluidSynth & LinuxSampler to read the soundfonts from the pendrive, you should create a “soundfont” folder in the pendrive and copy to it the soundfonts you want to use. You have to use a very strict directory structure, that is different for SF2 and SFZ/GIG. Take a look to “/zynthian/zynthian-data/soundfonts” and use it as a reference.
After that, you should create a “soft link” from “/zynthian/zynthian-my-data/”:
mv /zynthian/zynthian-my-data/soundfonts /zynthian/zynthian-my-data/soundfonts.bak
ln -s /media/usb0/soundfonts /zynthian/zynthian-my-data/soundfonts
Of course, if enough people find useful this trick and start to use it, i would consider to modify the engine code for looking at the pendrive without needing a soft-link …
Kind Regards,
Ah i see! Thank you for explaining. Will look into it further tomorrow.
If enough ppl find this useful, an Idea would be to have the system look in a document for places to look. Kinda like sources.list
Regards
Also since the rpi 4 have the USB 3 and seems to be superior over the microsd controller in speeds, it should load soundfonts faster than when on sdcards, if the soundfonts are big 
Best regards
I can’t try it for now but this would definitely be usefull for me
I would implement like that:
When a zynthian folder is found in the usb mount, link everything in that folder as symbolic link.
@jofemodo, tell me where and and try something…
Let me think about it … and please, open a task in our wonderful Tracking System 
Hi @zynthianers!
I just commited an implementation of this. Now you can access presets & soundfonts stored in a USB drive. Simply plug the drive and that’s all. The presets & soundfonts from the external USB-drive will be shown in the zynthian UI with “EX” prefix (external).
You have to use this directory structure:
soundfonts
presets
Some volunteer to write a brief explanation on the wiki?
Enjoy!
I’m writing the wiki page for external storage right now. Does the presets search path get expanded only to /media/usb0, or to every usb mass storage device connected? (Or does the automounter only mount one in the case of multiples?)
Edit: Here’s the page. Can you check it for correctness, esp. with regards to multiple drives? External storage - ZynthianWiki
Only one: /media/usb0
Where did you add the link for the External Storage section?
Also, i would like to short the section by removing the part where you say that exFAt is not supported.
Let’s include the exfat driver on the SD and that’s all
Could you try to install the driver and test if it works automatically?
apt-get -y install exfat-utils
Thanks!
Lemme grab a spare drive and test that!
And I linked it from both https://wiki.zynthian.org/index.php/Zynthian_UI_Users_Guide and https://wiki.zynthian.org/index.php/Zynthian_Features. As well, to ensure search coverage, I created a redirect “USB drive” that points to “External storage”.
Edit:
Nope, just installing exfat-utils doesn’t let automount see it. Audio record goes to SDC, and the drive is not visible in du:
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/root 29950364 9895632 18706708 35% /
devtmpfs 4045056 0 4045056 0% /dev
tmpfs 4078848 80508 3998340 2% /dev/shm
tmpfs 4078848 8620 4070228 1% /run
tmpfs 5120 4 5116 1% /run/lock
tmpfs 4078848 0 4078848 0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/mmcblk0p1 258095 54407 203688 22% /boot
tmpfs 815768 0 815768 0% /run/user/0
Looks like it’s just automount, though, nothing deeper, because if I manually mount it and /media/usb0, Audio Recorder uses it just fine.
root@zynthian:~# mount -t exfat /dev/sda1 /media/usb0/
FUSE exfat 1.3.0
root@zynthian:~# df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/root 29G 9.5G 18G 35% /
devtmpfs 3.9G 0 3.9G 0% /dev
tmpfs 3.9G 79M 3.9G 2% /dev/shm
tmpfs 3.9G 8.5M 3.9G 1% /run
tmpfs 5.0M 4.0K 5.0M 1% /run/lock
tmpfs 3.9G 0 3.9G 0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/mmcblk0p1 253M 54M 199M 22% /boot
tmpfs 797M 0 797M 0% /run/user/0
/dev/sda1 7.6G 4.7M 7.6G 1% /media/usb0
I think the issue may be that exfat is a FUSE filesystem, which requires special handling in udev. Possibly we could grab the kernelmode driver for exfat instead? Though that would be outside vanilla raspbian because of licensing concerns, I believe. I’ve not looked at the Samsung code, but I know several linux distros are going FUSE on exfat for licensing reasons/fear of Microsoft.
Same experience here with a new exfat usb disk, after install exfat-uitils the drive didn’t show up, but mounting manually did the trick.
Obviously this is not a sustainable solution, so hopefully this can be improved. If possible, I’d rather not reformat the USB disk. (The same USB disk is automatically mounted perfectly on another linux system)