This must be blindingly easy; so blindingly easy that I'm being... blind   and can't see how to do it.

I added some directories of Christmas music to my collection a few weeks ago. They were all under a directory called .../christmas/. So this morning I unchecked the .../christmas/ directory in the "Collection" dialog", expecting that amarok would no longer know about any of those files. Wrong: they are still appearing when I clear and regenerate a dynamic playlist.

So the question is: how do I tell amarok to forget about the Christmas songs?

Run tools->rescan collection.

Also, make sure that the folder is not under one you have selected if you are scanning recursively.

OK, thanks very much.

Maybe there should be something somewhere in the user's face to tell him to do this.

I (obviously) expected that unchecking the box would be enough and that any of the necessary back-end operations would occur automatically once that was done.

(Indeed, it's not obvious to the user that rescanning a collection is what the back end needs; to the extent that I thought about it, I figured that there would be a flag present in each record in the database to indicate whether an entry was active, and that unchecking the directory box would simply cause all the records for files in that hierarchy to be marked "inactive" internally; hence it wasn't at all obvious that rescanning would be the right thing to do.)

it does happen by itself if you have 'watch folders for changes' selected... although might not be immediate.

I'm not sure how useful it is to the average user to have something happen at some unknown point in the future after initiating an action. I have that box checked, and it didn't help me any, since immediately following my unchecking the .../christmas/ directory I cleared the current playlist and loaded a new dynamic playlist... and at that point amarok had definitely not removed the Christmas songs. Maybe if I'd waited for 10 seconds. Or 10 minutes. Or something. But there's nothing anywhere to indicate that unchecking a directory will not have an immediate effect. So the user (i.e., me ) is left thinking that he's done something wrong.

So I suggest that this is an a place where the interface could be made clearer in order to help the user understand that unchecking a directory doesn't immediately have the desired effect (but it will do so eventually -- at which point it should be made very obvious that the action has now completed).


 

dunno then - it happens pretty quickly here.