Howdy.

First, I love this thing.  There's no other audio player I'd rather use.  I can get my podcasts, listen to my music and lectures, and stream some seriously good music with it; it's a killer app.  I particularly love/want/need/refuse to give up the ability to choose where I will save various podcasts -- talk about giving power to the user.

And here's the "but":

I've found that whenever I have "Watch Folders for Changes" ticked, Amarok is almost constantly updating the database, never finishes, and the thing becomes unusable.  I eventually have to kill the program.  It's the same sort of thing documented at http://amarok.kde.org/forum/index.php/t ... 693.0.html.

It really didn't matter what I was doing with it.  Usually, I'm just streaming music and/or downloading some podcasts.  The database isn't huge.  But following Mark Kretschmann's advice (http://amarok.kde.org/forum/index.php/t ... 842.0.html), I ended up removing ~/.kde/share/apps/amarok and ~/.kde/share/config/amarokrc, purged the whole thing, re-installed, then turned off "Watch Folders for Changes," and since then it's been just fine.

This is on Kubuntu 7.04.  I know others have had some trouble with K/Ubuntu in the past.  I've seen plenty of questions and a couple work-arounds that involve rebuilding everything, but no fix.

Is there a fix for this?  And what's the problem in the first place?  I use Amarok for all my podcasting needs, which means adding all the feeds again and associating all the data to already downloaded files whenever I rebuild.  Which gets tedious.  Thankfully there's an opml import script, which has sped things up considerably.  But I'd rather not rebuild in the future if possible. 

So at this point is the only fix just to turn off "Watch Folders for Changes"?  I can live with that, I'm just curious.

Generally the folder watching works fine, there are no known problems with the implementation. The only known issues are with primitive filesystems like FAT32, which don't support mtime. And on networked filesystems (NFS, SMB, ..) you probably want to disable the watching too, for performance reasons.

Ah, okay, that makes sense.  I have all that data on a shared FAT32 partition.  Maybe I'll add NTFS support and convert the partition over, if that'd make a difference.  Otherwise I'll just leave it off.

Thanks for the reply, that clears up my question.