Hey,

Because i use a laptop i have all my music on an external USB hard disk, currently using the Ubuntu Edgy build.

The program would not add my collection at the wizard at the start, even though i told it to scan the "media" directory where my external hard disk is, you will have to excuse me because i am a newbie to linux!

So i went to the folder where my music is stored on my external drive and dragged it over to the "Collection" tab, it then went about its business for about 20 mins, there is quite a lot of music and then came up with a message which im kicking myself for at the moment for not writing down, but the general idea was "sorry xxxx songs could not be added"... to which i replied DOH!!

Pls dont make me have to go back to XMMS because frankly its rubbish!! (replace rubbish with an appropiate word)

Cheers
Ash

Okay so i tried running Amarok under Root thinking that this might be the problem, and it started making my collection..apart from one major problem.....it copied all the music from my external USB HD to the root dir of my local disk.... what on earth am i doing wrong!!!

Bangs head on table.... I REALLY WANNA USE THIS PROGRAM!!!

I'm no expert: I only joined the Forum today.

If you drag a folder onto the collection, it does indeed copy everything from that folder to "somewhere" on your hard drive. That's fine if you're transferring something from temporary storage (such as a USB stick), and you give it an appropriate location to copy everything to. If you've already got everything on a (reasonably) permanent hard drive, then you shouldn't be doing this.

Do you now need assistance removing all the files that have been copied?

Instead of dragging things to the collection tab, you really do want to scan your media directory. To redo this, go the Settings menu, and pick "Configure Amarok", then (in the configuration window that appears) select the Collection options, and make sure that the correct directories are selected for scanning. Once they are, scanning might start automatically (I'm a newbie too, remember , but you can always start it manually by invoking "Rescan Collection" from the Tools Menu.

What you'll probably find (based on my experience, and what seem to be fairly common comments) is that it takes the original 20 minutes or so, and then throws up the warning messages again. The solution to that is to move the problematic tracks to somewhere they won't be scanned, and rescan again. (In my case, the problems were all in .m4a files that I had acquired from a Mac owner, so they were all under a single directory structure. I just moved the entire set out of the way, and I'll deal with them later.)

Hi and thank you for your help so far!!

1. Your right about the dragging the folders! My boo boo!
2. It's okay i just deleted the files on my local drive!!!! (thank god!..had used up 100% space..but im such a newbie to linux that i dont wanna admit that ..darn it i just did )
3. Again your right about scanning the directory, that was the problem getting it to scan the bloody directory!!!!, so i bit the bullet and reinstalled Amarok again today, i went to select my Media folder where my external HD is, but again it did not show my drive on there...BUT when i exited out of that screen..then went back to it...IT WAS THERE!! DOH!! Anyways its in the process of scanning the EXT HD now.. i would love to blame myself for this, but i know how to click on a little cross to expand a directory and i swear the Ext HD was not there before...actually nothing was...grrrr
4. Well its at 74% at the mo lets see how it does...

Thank you for helping me out Wimble, much appreciated!!!
Regards
Ash