Hi,

I just installed the latest amarok on kubuntu and was eager to try out the long awaited dynamic collections feature as I have an USB hard drive that I would like plug in and out without the long "rescan collection" process.

However I can't seem to get this to work. I assume that this mechanism is working transparently, so that I just have to select the file system paths that make up my collection and amarok checks if these are available or not at runtime.
This is however not the case. When I mount or unmount my USB drive that is part of the collection after a while amarok still rescans the whole collection

Any tips how I can get this to work?

Dynamic Collection depends on a working KDE MediaManager. If you can see your USB hard drive in system:/media it should work correctly with Amarok.

If the KDE MediaManager is working correctly, please paste the output of dcop amarok collection query 'SELECT * FROM devices;' 

dcop amarok collection query 'SELECT * FROM devices;' outputs nothing (or better an empty line).

The KDE media manager is running and using hal for device discovery, which works very well. I'm using the latest KDE 3.5.4 packages for kubuntu.

Other dcop querys on the amarok dcop iface succeed. I can for example retrieve a list of composers via dcop amarok collection query 'SELECT * FROM composer;'

It sounds like the plugins are not loaded correctly. Run kbuildsycoca and then start Amarok. Running dcop amarok collection query 'SELECT * FROM devices;' again should now return more information. If it does rebuild your collection completely. If it does not, I have to think of something else 

Running kbuildsycoca didn't work either.
Maybe dynamic collection support is just not compiled in in the kubuntu packages?
Too bad that I currently can't try it on gentoo as my notebook is currently broken

Dynamic Collection is included in the Amarok 1.4.2 packages from www.imbrandon.com. You are using these, right?

Yes, that's what I use.

Try doing a rescan. It shouldn't help, but who knows.

Can you please post the results of the following two commands:
dcop amarok collection query 'select * from admin;'
and
dcop kded mediamanager fullList
your usb hard drive has to be mounted for the second command

Hi again!

I was away over the weekend but I appreciate your help alot!

@Ian Monroe:
Yeah, that didn't help. Rescanned my collection 20 times or something already

@Maximilian Kossick:
OK here we go:

Code: Select all

$ dcop amarok collection query 'select * from admin;'
Database Version
34
Database Stats Version
11
Database Persistent Tables Version
15
Database Podcast Tables Version
2
Database ATF Version
2
Database Devices Version
1


Code: Select all

dcop kded mediamanager fullList
/org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/volume_uuid_9a71f46b_73d8_4e12_8072_e2eee1f14bae
hda1
38G Media

true
/dev/hda1
/
ext3
true

media/hdd_mounted

---
/org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/volume_uuid_441D_8E07
hda3
39G Media

true
/dev/hda3
/mnt/mp3
vfat
true

media/hdd_mounted

---
/org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/platform_floppy_0_storage
fd0
Floppy Drive

true
/dev/fd0


false

media/floppy_unmounted

---
/org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/volume_uuid_6da41e48_c336_443c_8ca5_3acf32ebd011
sda1
1.0G Media

true
/dev/sda1

ext2
false

media/removable_unmounted

---
/org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/volume_uuid_431B_F09A
sda2
39G Media

true
/dev/sda2
/mnt/mp3usbhd
vfat
true

media/removable_mounted

---


 
So the last one obviously is my USB MP3 hard drive. It's mounted on /mnt/mp3usbhd via the fstab entry:

Code: Select all

/dev/usbhdmp3           /mnt/mp3usbhd   vfat            uid=1000,users          0 0

It's a vfat formatted drive so that I can use it on windows machines, too.
I usually mount it as the user that is also running amarok.

everything looks good so far.  Can you post the result of
dcop amarok collection query 'SELECT * from DEVICES;'

Code: Select all

$ dcop amarok collection query 'SELECT * from DEVICES;'



All I get is an empty line

wtf? why are SQL table names case sensitive? I wasn't able to test the query before posting, sorry.
try this:
dcop amarok collection query 'select * from devices;'

hm some databases are case sensitive. I remember having had this problem on a mysql database sometime.
But in this case the lowercase syntax doesn't make a difference. The output stays the same
I really don't get it. Should I send you my sqllite collection db?

I just upgraded to 1.4.3 which rescanned my collection on startup. However there is no change concerning the dynamic collections

yes, please send me your collection.db. Or you can check it yourself if the table devices exists and is empty, or simply does not exist. Unfortunately I don't know how to query the database metadata.