Hi!

I'm using the 2.1 Beta packages from http://ppa.launchpad.net/kubuntu-experi ... ppa/ubuntu, because the stable Ubuntu version didn't see parts of my collection and had the scrobbling bug. (I'd still be using the 1.x branch for a while if they hadn't removed that from Ubuntu...)

Two days ago, I noticed that one of my albums (FLAC rips) had the track titles shuffled around (in the ID3 tags and the filenames), so I fixed the tags and then renamed the files in Konqueror. That resulted in Amarok constantly re-scanning the collection every few minutes (starting at about 75%) and seeing most tracks from that album twice. After disabling and enabling the collection directory several times and a couple of restarts, the album showed up correctly, but the repeated scanning never stopped.

Currently, two days later, Amarok still starts scanning my collection every few minutes or so at about 8%, taking up most of my CPU power for a couple of minutes (scanning 300GB of FLACs on an external drive takes a while). It's also currently using 570MB of memory, but that can go up to about 1GB or so. Every once in a while this interrupts music playback, and over long it results in my system getting unresponsive,

I suppose clearing the collection database and rebuilding it might solve the problem, but I couldn't figure out how to do that - disabling the music folder in the collection setup doesn't really help, at best it doesn't utterly confuse Amarok.

Here is a workaround (finding out the true source of your problem would be more time intensive):

Disable "Watch Folders For Changes" in the collection settings.


PS:
If you then want to update the collection, you can simply click "Update Collection" manually. It triggers the same code.

Yes, that'll do for now. But I do hope the real problem will be fixed. One thing I've always liked about Amarok is that it was able to quickly refresh my collection while I was ripping a new CD - whereas it takes Winamp at work 20 minutes to update the database when I have new stuff on my disk.

Amarok still uses more than 500MB right after starting though. Without automatic scanning it stays at that level, but it still seems a bit much?

You might be having issues with one of the plasma thingies in the middle pane. Try removing any and re-adding them.

Just tried that. Without any applets and scripts it uses 360MB after startup (with a collection of 37,285 tracks). With "Current Track" and "Albums" applets it goes back up to about 520MB.

That's not going to keep me from using Amarok. It just sounds a bit much. Mind you, I'm using the Ubuntu package of the Beta version, so perhaps that's missing some optimisations.

For what it's worth, disabling collection watching is really just a very temporary workaround: Updating the collection (roughly 300 gigs of mostly FLAC files) takes about 90 minutes that way. There are many reasons why I'm looking forward to replacing my Winamp at work with Amarok someday, and one of them is hopefully having access to my collection without having to wait over an hour for my new music to show up.

Well I upgraded to 2.1 and the collection management is still totally broken. I've tried various versions of 2.x in the past and always ended up going back to 1.4 when half of my collection simply vanished and no amount of re-scanning would rediscover the missing tracks (which are perfectly fine on my disk).

But now with 2.1, Amarok actually *re-tags* some tracks in the internal database. mplayer shows the ID3 tags in the files are still fine (phew), and the files haven't been modified since when I originally ripped & tagged them, but again, no amount of re-scanning can convince Amarok to read the tags - apparently some ID and incorrect tag information is stuck in the database. The tags are a mix of random, completely unrelated files in my collection. And what's worse, some of these don't even show up in the collection under the name they're listed in the "Current Track" applet.  As a bonus, the collection browser shows two artist nodes "Unknown", each with one album "Unknown", both with the same content (these *are* un-tagged files, but they shouldn't show up twice). I suspect they appear only once in the model, because if I open the first "Unknown" artist, followed by its "Unknown" album, and then the second "Unknown" artist, that second artist's album opens automatically.

Most of my files are FLACs, in case the file format is relevant here.

I'm said to say that even with 2.1, the new Amarok is still completely unusable to me. And that's not counting the various more or less minor annoyances it still has for me, but real show stoppers in the core features and collection stability. To make matters worse, Ubuntu officially only includes the 2.x branch, and while 1.4 packages are available and working fine, the package dependencies force me to uninstall one version when installing the other. For the past few months, I've constantly been un- and re-installing various versions of Amarok.

Ah well... time to revert to 1.4 now.