You are allowed backup. I doubt that is the issue given any music app I have had on Android sees and cans use sdcards. Not all iPhones use big storage and you have to pay a ridiculous premium to have it when they do.
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OK, not familiar with UK law, I thought there were discussions like this on the Naim forum in the past.
True
Premium or not, I donāt think iPhones ever had expandable storage, and with the iPhone having ~50%+ market share in the US, maybe they donāt consider it worthwhile. I dunno. Current iPhone starts at 256 GB internal as well.
If DAPs rely on SD cards, this is obviously a problem. No idea about DAPs
Still not a lot of storage given the price of the devices and no way to upgrade other than get a new phone or pay a silly premium for more at the start. My iPhone 13 has 128gb a big chunk of which you canāt use as itās for the os, one before only had 64gb they only recently started adding a higher amounts.
I am not in the US and this should not dictate anything , Roon sells globally and globally Android beats iPhone. Itās also not exactly a new thing for Android to support expandable storage. Just a bad design choice.
This may all be, but the point remains that support for SD cards does not help if you canāt insert one.
There are always trade-offs regarding where you spend your development time on, and the largest / most profitable market always dictates. Facts of life. I donāt know if supporting external storage is significant work though.
This I doubt very much given itās part of the os and the most basic apps can use them. As far as I know it just needs to ask permission to use it.
All streaming apps give you the choice to.
Yeah I guess. Iām all for supporting it if reasonably possible, as obviously it would help users who for some reason need a yearās worth of music downloaded / donāt have enough internal storage. Iām just, as always, inclined to think we as users may not know everything. (My real life job hazard, because Iām being told all day every day by users of our software product what they think should be easy but in fact isnāt, and we are not idiots 
)
While true that streaming apps support it, I havenāt had any good experience with it either, even if not formatted as unified internal storage. Both the Tidal and the Qobuz app lost SD downloads regularly for me until I stopped trying.
Iām in the UK and not aware of a ridiculous law that says I cannot backup a cd.
Every music app I remember ever using has allowed the option of saving or reading from SD card. I was about to enable smart downloads but if itās ignoring cd quality setting I will pass
I recalled people from the UK discussing this repeatedly on the Naim forum in recent years but I guess their info may have been out of date. Apparently the ridiculous law did exist until 2014 but was changed:
Yep it was silly but I donāt think anyone adhered to it. I certainly didnāt. I bought it itās mine to do what I want with it. Itās silly stuff like this that leads and encourages piracy along with regional restrictions. They make the rod for their own back and people break it because itās just ridiculous.
It was more of a omission from the law or no exemption.
I donāt believe anyone was prosecuted for it, but there was always the possibility of idiotās doing something out of malice or just because they were idiots
Of course private people wouldnāt adhere to it but it could have had an impact on what commercial software vendors would have been able to legally offer.
Anyway, this part is clearly moot now (and anyway I had just been speculating/wondering if any such thing might have an impact. Just curious and IANAL)
It hasnāt had any impact on anything as far as I know. You could buy rippers in the uk before the law changed. It likely opened it up more as a result mind.
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Unfortunately the legislation that made it legal to copy CDās for personal use in the UK that was introduced in 2014 was, in 2015, subjected to judical review where the complaints of the music industry were upheld - so, unless something more recent has changed, it is still illegal to rip CD for personal use. The Guardian article linked below gives some details.
Guardian: High court quashes regulations
There is (and always has been - even before 2015) a right to make a ābackup copyā but the copy āmust be kept with the originalā which is vague enough to be pretty useless and certainly does not guarantee that a digital copy kept on a (home) server would be compliant. This right, however, does not confer the right to bypass copy protection/DRM mechanisms.
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Hey @Paul_Whittaker thanks for reporting this. Did you adjust the quality setting before turning on SDL? If it kicked in prior, it probably grabbed the first item in OPUS and continued as such. The 24bit with CD quality is strange however.
Where did you adjust the quality setting fromāSDL page or from within settings?
Also, are you talking about the downloads being the wrong quality as they pour in through SDL, or are you attempting to convert already downloaded things to a new quality (via the DL menu)? Lmk if this makes sense. The issue as I understand from your report @Suedkiez is that it was about conversion. I had also thought this was resolved. Is it still acting up for you?
-Michael
What you said makes sense. The enable button is at the top and so its the first thing I did before selecting my quality further down the page.
As excited as I was for smart downloads it turns out even if It did work, its rarther useless for me im afraid. I bought a DAP for mobile use where content is stored on an SD card. Ive come to realise Arc wont work with it so I have given up on the feature.
Are there plans to support SD cards for DAP users? My DAP is roon certified.
Thanks for the feedback regardless Itās on our radar and Iāve got some DAPs here for testing, canāt make a firm time commitment unfortunately
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Just it being on your radar is all I need.
FiiO M11S is what im using though plan to get something higher end if Arc meets all my needs one day.
Thank you for your response.
Iām continuing my responses in the EA thread, more is upcoming
Just thought Iād share my experience. I am in a similar boat as @Paul_Whittaker . I have an Android DAP (Hiby Digital m300) which has 32 GB internal storage and 128 GB on a SD card formatted as internal storage. I then asked Arc to download 40 GB of music. It filled up the internal storage entirely and downloading stopped. Though Arc recognizes the total combined capacity it seems to be unable to actually cross over and store anything on the SD card. I hope that in the future adoptable storage can be supported or - even better - content can just be saved directly on an externally formatted SD.
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