I've been using XMMS now for years. Everytime I install the latest openSuSE distribution on one of my boxes I hope to be able to move on to Amarok, but no, even with 10.3:

* the playlist reacts slowly (opening a folder almost takes a second. Closing it takes the same time.
* XMMS for me plays this live strream without problems: http://dradio-live.ogg.t-bn.de/dlf_low.ogg. Amarok claims it's playing but there's no sound at all. (Yes, the volume is up).

My music collection is located on an NFS server which export the music to each machine in my home. There are approx. 15000 files in the playlist. Is Amarok unable to manage this volume more quickly?

Concerning the live stream: I am living in New Zealand, and the stream source is thus in the furthest possible location, but as I said, XMMS quickly fills the cache and starts playing whereas Amarok appears to do nothing at all.

I should add that for all these "benefits" Amarok consumes ~90MB of main memory!!!

Cheers,
Mike

* opening a folder? What folder?
* stream problem is related to xine. Try reducing the buffer.
* you need to read up on how memory works in linux. 90Mb of memory, 80% of this is shared memory loaded which Qt & KDE libraries use.
* Amarok is NOT designed to have 15,000 tracks in the playlist. You need to get OUT of the xmms mindset. Try dynamic mode which can shuffle all of your tracks for you.

Hi,

sorry, my mistake, it's not the play list with 15,000 entries, it's the "Collection". And that's where opening/closing folders is slow.

I don't really understand the structure of the collection, because everything, albums, songs and bands appear in there. Alphabetically sorted. I would usually expect band/album/song.

Tools->Statistics is quite funny: Opening it takes about 3 seconds. Is that normal? Even worse: Moving the mouse pointer around the items in the Statistics (moving the pointer from one item to the next highlights the new choice, e.g. "Favorite Genres"): The color-cycle (which I suppose should be fluent and quick takes no less than 20 seconds, approximately 1 new shade for text and background per second. Very slow motion.

I'm running this on an P4m 2.2 GHz laptop, 1G of RAM. I know it's not the latest, but on such a machine a simple color-cycle can't possibly take 20 seconds?!

Back, to the "Collection": The (file system) structure of my collection dates back to 1998, maybe this is another source of trouble with Amarok. It is arrange like this (and was maintained automatically with various Perl scripts):

A folder /cds which holds all the complete CDs, I have in my collection. There are subfolders for the encoder used: "fraunhofer", "lame", "flac", and "unknown". Whenever I encode an Album I already have with a better encoder, the old version is deleted ("unknown"-> "lame", for instance. Each of these subfolders has a BandName/AlbumName/SongFileName structure.

Apart from the CDs directory, there is a "individual_songs" directory which I can check when I want to know whether I have a particular song of a some band. This directory again is organized in the BandName/AlbumName/SongFileName structure. Stuff that I downloaded for the net in the early days (Napster...) landed in there. All the files in the cds directory are (soft-)linked into the corresponding folders of the "individual_songs" directory. As this can obviously lead to filename clashes (consider how many CDs there are with Dire Straits "Money For Nothing" for instance), the Perl script setting up the links adds the album name to the link name in square brackets:

Money For Nothing [Best Of Rock].mp3
Money For Nothing [Brothers In Arms].mp3
Money For Nothing [Fetenhits - The Real Classics].mp3
Money For Nothing (Live) [Sultans Of Swing - The Very Best Of Dire Straits].mp3
Money For Nothing [Money For Nothing].mp3
Money For Nothing [Sultans Of Swing - The Very Best Of Dire Straits].mp3

These are all nothing but links. The "Brothers In Arms" version of the song is quite different from the "Money For Nothing" version, The name extensions guarantee that I can find both different versions in the "Dire Straits" folder of the "individual_songs" directory.

BTW: Amarok lists all the "Money For Nothing" links like this (in the Collection):

Money For Nothing [Best Of Rock
Money For Nothing [Brothers In Arms
Money For Nothing [Fetenhits - The Real Classics
Money For Nothing (Live) [Sultans Of Swing - The Very Best Of Dire Straits
Money For Nothing [Money For Nothing
Money For Nothing [Sultans Of Swing - The Very Best Of Dire Straits

I.e. the closing "]" is not showing. Same for all the other links. Can't imagine this is a feature.

My impression is that Amarok took all the links as real files, and therefore added plenty of files twice to the "Collection". "Favorite Tracks" in the "Collection" shows more than 30000 items.

I should also add that most of my files do not have any ID3s, because how would ever decide for each individual song what "Genre" it belongs to? For many songs I wouldn't have a clue. I am aware that there might be a Internet solution to this, but other services of this type such as freedb are full of typos and other issues and I'm quite sure that would also be the case with any public ID3 services that may exist. I decided to leave this information out altogether.

Maybe I'm totally wrong with much of what I'm writing here, because of my "XMMS" mindset. I'll appreciate any enlightening replies.

Cheers,
Raimund

No, these symptoms are not right. Perhaps you have some libraries which are not the same against which Amarok is built. Which distro are you using, and how did you install amarok?

Hi,

I haven't done anything fancy like compiling it myself. I simply installed openSuSE 10.3 with the Mini-Install-CD from the repositories on my NFS server. Before the actual installation it is possible to include additional installation sources and among others I added the Packman repository. I never had issues with these pre-built packages,

Just to be sure I'm installing the latest build (2 days old) right now and check it again...

The new version asks for an library update of libmtp. This is also provided by Packman.

Done. The behavior is exactly the same. "libmtp" didn't make any difference. My KDE is the standard install as it comes with openSuSE 10.3. Just to be 100% sure, I'm wiping it off the disk now and put the original openSuSE package on instaed:

Done and also no success. Statistics window and contents is as slow as described before.


There seem to be more issues, for instance the collection is empty and the statistics window shows "0" in each category when I start Amarok on my desktop machine. This is weird, because my home directory is an NFS share and thus 100% identical to the laptop (also importing the NFS share). So ~/.kde/share/apps/amarok/* and ~/.kde/share/config/amarokrc are identical on both machines. And yes, everything that's imported on the laptop is imported on the desktop box.

Cheers,
Raimund