First off - I'd like to congratulate the amaroK team for thier media player. I was using xmms and frustrated at the lack of effective playlist management. amaroK has turned my PC into the music player it should be.

I'm currently having issues scanning samba shares on two other PCs on my home network.

Both PCs have shares totalling around 500 albums and, needless to say, I'd like to have these as part of my amaroK collection.

These samba shares are mounted on my local filesystem.

My issue is that amaroK only seems to pick up 30 or so albums in every 100. All the mp3s are tagged and are arranged in a directory structure that sorts the tracks by artist and album.

I have tried adding the floders to the scan list by specifying the path using a "smb://" url, but that doesn't seem to work either - if I specify "smb://pcname/musicshare", a folder of the name "/musicshare/" is added to the folders list, branching from the root directory of my local machine

I can browse the the directory I want with the file browser and add mp3s to the playlist, but I'd really like to have everything searchable in my collection.

I could, of course, add every individual folder for each artist/album to the scan list but that's not really solving the problem; plus it would be a major job and a pain in the backside.

Any ideas?

Can anyone at least instract me on how to specify a path with "smb://" correctly, or even confirm that they've managed to correctly pass such a path to amaroK's scan folders list?

better mount those dirs with smbmount. adding collection-dirs with smbfs:// won't work at the moment.

regards,
muesli

Some things to check for samba and getting the smb://pcname/musicshare to work correctly. From the terminal, see if you can connect to the pc by using smbclient -L //pcname. If this shows the musicshare listed correctly, then make sure you have lisa running. Lisa lets you use the smb:// thing. You can use the lisa config wizard by clicking the control center, then on internet & network, then on the local network browsing. This works on Fedora Core1/2 (not sure about redhat, been awhile). Check the netbios name lookup by issuing nmblookup pcname. If the nmblookup says it coudln't look up the hostname, then check out the iptables configuration. Stop iptables and try again. If it worked, then its a firewall issue. nmblookup sends out a ping request on port 137 to that pcname and that pcname responds on a random port in the range 32770-32790 (personal experience on the port range). You will need to punch a hole in the firewall for this range of udp ports. an example of punching that hole: iptables -I -i -p udp --sport 137 --dport 32770:32790 -j ACCEPT. The combination of the lisa daemon and having proper ports open, you should be able to use smb://pcname inside konqueror to view the network shares. I don't know for sure if other programs such as xmms can use this syntax.

If you want to actaully mount the smb file system to a spot, you need to use smbmount. Make a directory to mount the file ssytem, call it anything you want, for example networkmusic. example on using smbmount: smbmount //pcname/musicshare /networkmusic . You may need to specify optional params like username and password for this to work. There is a nice gui for using smbmount, its called LinNeighborhood. LinNeighborhood 0.6.5 is the latest, (http://www.bnro.de/~schmidjo/) but it has a patch that needs to be applied for it work successfully. It is kind of a pain to get set up, but well worth if. I hope this helps.

Thanks for the exceptionally comprehensive answer, kc8hfi.

My samba and iptables config allows me to mount the music shares from the other hosts using smbclient. and I can play audio and video from the shares.

My main issue is that amaroK seems reluctant to add about 2/3 of the music on those shares, based on thier meta information. It does pick and add some, however there seems to be no rhyme or reason when separating those mp3s that do appear from those that don't.

Can anyone think of a reason for this?

The media players on the two other machines pick up the meta info on the tracks and add them just fine.

They're not running amaroK or samba though, so don't offer a direct comparison.

diceman wrote:

My main issue is that amaroK seems reluctant to add about 2/3 of the music on those shares

I have this same problem. The samba share is mounted fine, I can browse it from the amarok machine (/mnt/music/files/country etc...). But scanning the files never completes... It stops at 31% or 57% or some such, and that\'s it.

Did you find a solution?

Thanks a bunch.
M.

Something else I noticed ... me too, I have my mp3 files on a SMB share. Amarok does not seem to be able to read the tags in the mp3\'s. When I copy those mp3\'s locally, Amarok is suddenly able to read the tags successfully !

TagLib can\'t read tags remotely.

mounting it via smbmount / smbfs helps.

regards,
muesli

I have noticed that an earlier version of amaroK that I have installed in Vector Linux has no trouble reading the MP3 tags on my Samba share. I tried installing the earlier version (1.2.4), but there were unresolved dependencies, so I could not install it, unfortunately. Is anyone going to be releasing a bug-fix? Obviously, something went wrong with the newer version.....

By the way, I have never been able to mount a Samba share in Konqueror. How would one do that?

Daryl

I have the same problem and my samba share is mounted with smbfs. I also think that it worked with prior versions of amarok.
A solution would be nice.

Thanks in advance
caspar

I was having the same problem: I couldn\'t load into amaroK a large portion of the music that I had on a mounted samba share.

I found an adequate solution here:
http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/taglib-de ... 00112.html

I did as he suggested and taglibs was able to read all of my music. I wish I understood better exactly what the problem is because with this solution my mounts are read only and I would like the directories to be writeable. Oh well, its an acceptible compromise.

Does anyone know whether this bug has been fixed? I saw no mention of it in the news release regarding the latest edition....

Daryl

Hmmm... this (keeping my collection on samba remote shares) works fine for me.

Here\'s my entry from /etc/fstab:

//butler/space1 /mount/butler/space1 cifs rw,uid=john,gid=john,credentials=/space1/cred/john 0 0

I can then browse and add files from /mount/butler/space1/MP3s to my collection, no problem. Note that I\'m mounting with cifs, and I\'m using rw (not ro, as per the other post cited).

I\'m running amarok 1.3.1 on ubuntu breezy. Thing is, this has worked for me since at least 1.2.3 (possibly earlier, can\'t remember the first version of amarok that I ran).

Note that your sqlite database should *not* be on a samba share. In general, I\'ve often had better results running a mysql database, and have had problems running with sqlite and samba shares in the past that were seemingly cured by moving to mysql.

Well, my problem was not with Amarok not being able to read the music on my Samba shares but with it not being able to read the MP3 TAGS off my Samba shares....

Daryl