I have yet another puzzling instance of my collection not appearing in amarok yet still being in the mysql database.  I'm using gentoo / amarok 1.4.4 / kde 3.5.5 / mysql 5.0.26.  I have not recently updated amarok/kde/mysql.

When I start amarok, it does not complain about being able to connect to the database, in fact netstat shows amarokapp connecting to mysqld six times.  Where it normally lists my favourite albums, it now says that it will list them when I play some songs, all my ratings are gone (everything that is not stored in the tags of the music file is gone).  If I play a track that was already in the playlist, it says it is not in the collection, however if I make changes to it, eg. rating it, they will stick (but the track still doesn't show in the collection).  The collection tab shows an empty collection, the statistics are as for an empty collection.

Since I have no idea, I will list some small things that happened that probably are not related:

Recompiled kdebase-kioslaves with hal support.
Recompiled taglib with a "dirtypointer" patch to alter flac handling (I have some flac files in my collection, but by no means is everything flac).
Recompiled libmad with a patch that changes cflags (not really sure what it did, but this isn't a playback problem so it is unlikely).

Let me know what other info I can provide to help.

Edit: and I forgot to mention that this setup has worked for months previously

Could you please try changing the collection "group by..." setting then changing it back, to see if this makes any difference?

You may also (if you haven't done so recently) want to restart your runlevel (or just reboot).

Unfortunately changing group by doesn't help.

I have also rebooted after this problem manifested itself and it has not fixed it.

You could also try recompiling amarok after the small changes you made. Can you pinpoint any other system configuration changes you might have made? For example, adding/changing volumes, either local or networked. The changes to kdebase-kioslaves (HAL) *might* have changed something in the way KDE identifies some devices.

I already tried recompiling amarok before rebooting, it made no difference.  The ext3 filesystem my collection is on (which is not the one the database is on) had a check done on it the boot before this problem appeared, I wrote it off as coincidence.  I should point out that I am not using KDE, just amarok and some KDE progs.  I have recently changed my system to use dbus, but I ignored that as I assumed amarok and KDE stuff ignored dbus.  Part of that was the installation of the dbus-qt3-old package (D-BUS Qt3 bindings compatible with old application API and new dbus, see http://www.gentoo-portage.com/dev-libs/dbus-qt3-old for all I know about it).

I'll try rebuilding kioslaves without HAL support and get back to you.

There was also a pax-utils upgrade, a gettext upgrade, and some patches applied to PAM (to change the path to xauth).

Thanks for all the help so far.

Edit: Rebuilding kioslaves without HAL fixes it.  So is this a HAL bug, a kioslaves bug, or an amarok bug?  Possibly a gentoo bug?

OH... I just fixed this prob myself, by installing dbus-qt-old *and* dbus-glib - it was the second one that finally fixed the annoying upgrade/downgrade cycle brought on by different packages requiring different, unslottable versions.

With these two packages installed, I was able to use only the later version of dbus, and kdebase-kioslaves compiled fine with hal USEflag.

I already have both these packages installed (and only the new dbus).  And to be clear, kioslaves builds fine with HAL, it just causes amarok to have the collection issues.

gotcha - well I don't have the prob with amarok-svn, so if it's an amarok bug, it's probably been fixed

So, I know grave digging is evil and all, but I feel that in this case it is the best thing to do (seeing as this is still the same problem which I have just been using a workaround for).

So after working around the above issue (by building kioslaves without hal support), I have gotten sick of it.  I assumed (hoped) that after some updates to packages, this would resolve itself.  One year later (yes it is coincidence, I haven't been counting days) this problem still exists.

So just to be clear, what is happening is that:
* The collection still exists in mysql, I can connect on the command line and query it, and I can make dumps of it.
* Anything stored in the database before I connect after rebuilding kioslaves doesn't show in the collection list (but still appears in the database).  All ratings I made before are not reflected in amarok (but as I said, they are still in the database).  All information stored in tags still shows.
* Any songs I add now show up in the database and amarok, now and after restarts.
* Any changes I make (ie. ratings, playcounts) to new and existing songs are updated in the database, and show up in amarok now and after restarts.
* I can only access old stuff because it is in my playlist.

So I'm guessing the solution is to rebuild (ie. delete database and rescan) my database, I don't care so much about losing playcounts, but I would like my ratings preserved.  Does anyone know how I can get my ratings from a mysql dump into my new database?  Is there some way to export them and then import them (I haven't deleted my database yet).  Or is there some way to fix my existing database?

Thanks in advance for any help.  If it helps, I have built amarok (and almost everything in my system) with debugging symbols.