External storage

External USB storage can be connected to any of the Raspberry Pi USB ports. While external storage is not necessary, it is highly recommended for use with Audio & MIDI recording. SD card lifetime is prolonged the fewer writes are done to it, and both the audio and MIDI recorders will automatically write to external storage instead of the SD card if connected.

1 Recommendations

• FAT-32. To be recognized automatically by the official ZynthianOS distribution without installation of additional drivers, external storage drives should be formatted as FAT-32. Most large USB flash drives come preformatted with exFAT, so you will need to reformat these drives before use with Zynthian.
• USB 3.0. If using a Raspberry Pi 4, external storage should be connected to the USB 3.0 (blue) ports to maximize read/write speed.

2 Presets and Soundfonts

The search path for presets and soundfonts automatically includes the /media/<drive>/zynthian/zynthian-my-data/ directory on mounted external drives. Presets and soundfonts loaded from external storage will be displayed in the Zynthian UI with an "EX" prefix (external). The directory structure must strictly follow the structure of the main /zynthian/zynthian-my-data directory outlined on Accessing Zynthian from your computer.