hi,
I'm new to amarok - my problem is: I cannot build correctly a collection
that means:
the collection scanner scans all my music files starting from the selected entry point point in my linux file tree.
but the files are listed in the collection window in a genre/artist/album hirarchy as follows:
Untitled
  Untitled
    Untitled
      file1
      file2
      file......
      file......
      file999

in the mysql database I see only 1 (unnamed) entry for each of the tables "genre", "artist", "album"....

In the linux file tree my music files are ordered by this information
genre1
  artist1
      album1
        file1
        file2
genre2
  artist2
      album1
        file1
        file2


my question:
where tries the collection scanner to find the information about genre, artist, album from?

thank you for any advice

Amarok gets almost everything from tags in the file. There are many tagging programs for Linux, including
amarok itself. My current favourite is exfalso.  Most tagging programs can use the file name to guess tags.
There are also some batch mode taggers for tagging large collections of files.  Look for terms like "id3", "id3v2"
and "mp3 tag"

I'm sorry to say that if there are no tags at all in your music, it could be a fair amount of work to get things into shape so
that amarok (or ipod) works well.

thank you for your answer,
in the meantime I solved the problem for myself: I migrated my database info from my MythTV database into the related tables of amarok's db. So I got a nice collection and perfect playlists
but the next problem comes soon. Yesterday I made the weekly upgrade for my Debian-testing distro: there were new upgrades for amarok packages and after this all my playlists were gone.....

but noe I have my scripts and can re-create it again.

If you can figure out a way to generate id3 tags based on your database, then the data would be preserved across upgrades (and across
switching players).  Given a tagged collection, amarok would just require a collection scan to  rebuild the database  (there are some exceptions to this currently, namely lyrics and cover art). Of course, there is the "if it works, don't mess with it factor".