How do I point Aves to a USB-attached FAT32 file system?

[pone36]

I am using Aves under both Android on a Samsung tablet and ChromeOS, as an installed Android app. I don't see a clear interface to add a new file system to the list of places that Aves will look for media files? The one setup screen I have reports on a list of file system that Aves looks at, but it gives me no way to edit or add to that list.

Android in particular is extremely featureless when it comes to mounting a USB stick. The drive is usable by File Managers, but media applications like Aves never seem to have an easy way to work with the drive. I am able to open media on the USB in Aves using a File Manager, but then Aves is unable to go on its own to the next file. Aves never sees any foler on the flash drive as an Album.

Under ChromeOS, it's a similar kind of failure. Android media apps just don't know how to deal with the flash drive. And the native OS has extremely poor tools for giving Media applications permissions to a mounted file system.

How do I get Aves to see the mounted USB file system under either Android or ChromeOS?

[deckerst]

Short answer: it's not supported (yet).

Your diagnostic is correct: Android doesn't expose external drives to media apps. Aves is not a file manager, it's a gallery app, so it has a limited view of storage. It gets the list of media files from Android, and Android discovers media files from stable storage. Transient storage, like OTG sticks, are not scanned for media by Android.

That said, maybe we can manually select a drive and make Aves scan for media on it, but it's something I need to explore.

Related:

• OTG Device Support  #366

[pone36]

Let's confine the discussion to native Android since your app was designed for that OS. When I use other media applications, like "Simple Gallery", it has a user interface to "add included folders". That interface is able to see the USB device that is mounted and navigate its file tree, at which point I can select a folder. From that point forward, Simple Gallery sees the folders on the USB FAT32 file system.

Now that's only part of the story, because this works on some tablets and on others Android itself seems to incorrectly interact with the USB. On Android 16 with an A9+ tablet, the Android OS thinks my USB file system is a foreign computer that it is tethered to. When I find the OS settings for USB, I am unable to select any option but tethering, when there are other options there to treat the USB as a file system. The point of mentioning this is that Android itself appears to be a total mess when dealing with USB file systems. They claim it is a security issue, but clearly it is about their priorities being somewhere else, and they don't appear to have the time to make very basic features work correctly.

But on my other Android tablets, Simple Gallery is able to include the USB file system into its included folders.

In Aves, I don't find any interface to add folders. Such an interface would be useful even for just pointing to places on the Internal storage. So adding that would be helpful.

In Aves, there is an "Explore" feature, and you can get it to present an option to explore either USB or Internal, but whenever I select USB, nothing happens. Aves chokes on this and keeps showing Internal storage.

So there is some combination of misfeatures in Android and (possibly) missing functionality in Aves.