Hello,
I started using Amarok a couple of days ago, under Kubuntu 7.0.4 and I have a problem with covers downloads or I still haven't understood how it works.
I come from Windows XP and I'm used to use Windows Media Player.
I have about 1500 mp3 and all have ID3 tags compiled (at least title, artist, album, year).

I open the cover manager and Amarok starts to do... something and it remains busy for a lot of minutes. At the end I can only see 2 covers for all my albums (some show one cover, some the other).
Then Amarok appears to be starting to download covers (again or for the first time? boh) from the Internet, or at least I think this because I see a progress status bar at the bottom. But  it is extremely slow and I cannot see any new cover.
Furthermore, while doing this Amarok is extremely slow in every other operations, like changing track, adjust volume, etc.

I add this: If I right-click over an album and select to download from Amazon, then I can get the correct cover. So I ask:

Is there any problem in my installation or this is a correct behavior?
How long does Amarok take to download covers?
The download of covers is a manual or automated task?

Can anybody explain me how it works, please. Thank you.

It takes a while to open the Cover Manager, and downloading covers (which isn't automatically started, you have to press "Fetch Missing Covers") will also take a while. But "several minutes" for opening the manager for just 1500 files sounds too long. 1500 isn't that much, really.

OK, this make us to think that there is a problem. What can I do to solve it?
Is there something I can check?

If your music is on a network share it will be slower.

The covers thing... if you have lots of unrelated tracks in one directory, and there happen to also be any album cover images in that dir, amarok will use that cover for all the tracks/albums in that directory.

My music is on my local disk, in my home directory.

What do you mean by "unrelated" tracks? All my tracks are together in a single directory, do you mean that I should create separated folders for each album to help Amarok to identify songs and albums? I don't event want to think it.

In effect there was a some jpg in the folder, but now i see that Amarok itself saves the covers in that folder, so I can't understand why it makes a mess.

I also tried to remove Amarok and reinstalling it but I got the same situation; I shoud try to delete the profile folder with all my setting... but I don't know if it exists and where it is.

As things are now Amarok is unusable for me. But I would be happy if I could set it up properly.

If your music is all correctly tagged, you can very easily use Amarok to sort the music into whatever directory structure you like. In the Files Browser, right-click on your music directory and select "move to collection". This will open a dialogue asking a few questions (if you want to customise the directory structure, click "advanced"). When you click "ok", Amarok will proceed to rearrange your music. Basically the same thing iTunes does.

If you like, you can select just a few tracks to start with - so you can see what it does.

I uninstalled Amarok again and I found and deleted the profile folder, too. Now I have made a new fresh install, loaded the music from the folder but the covers search is still bugged. It load a lots of wrong covers, besides taking a lot of time to complete the scan.
I think that cover handling by Amarok is really flawed.

What's worse it that it's not even consequent. I rcently bought myself four new machines, all identical, all running identical installs except for machine name and IP. I added my music collection, which is on a server, then started downloading album art on all four machines.

Now the wierdness begins:

1. A lot more covers are wrong than I remember from my earlier machines.
2. The four machines get different covers for the same album.
3. I have to run 'fetch missing covers' many times, each time getting a few more.
4. Some covers are dead wrong (no, Einstürzende Neubaten is not the same as Sesame Street), but in some cases, the artist is correct, but the cover is wrong.

#4 I can understand, detection is not an exact science, #1 feels like a regression (or bad memory), but #2 and #3 is wierd.

"fetch missing covers" *is* a fairly inexact science at the best of times - you're completely dependant on amazon *knowing* that the album you're fetching a cover for is the right one for the cover it picks.
Amazon also seems to give you a random cover if it can't exactly match. This is particularly a problem if you have more obscure music, or lots of compilations.

If you've got the time to spend, you're better off working through the albums in the cover manager manually - this will give you a better idea of what's going on. It should also be possible to share album covers between your different machines through some directory mounting magic. That way, which-ever covers you fetch on one machine will show up on all machines in the right place.