Hi
In Amarok 1.4, the automatic .mood generator script for the moodbar put the .mood files in an alternative directory in the user's home instead of cluttering the collection.
I'd love to use that again but I dont know if amarok looks in an alternative directory at all and if yes in what format the entries of that dir are supposed to be.
Could some developer tell us what the current logic is to find the .mood files matching a track?
Thanks a lot

Matt

http://amarok.kde.org/wiki/Moodbar has a thorough discussion of the Moodbar now.

For a technical explanation of original concept:

http://exscalibar.sourceforge.net/files/ismir-2005.pdf

Hi
Thanks for your reply. I know that page but unfortunately it also hasn't got the information I'm looking for...
I know that I can place the *.mood files in the same dir as the MP3 but I hate to pollute my collection with those unimportant files. That's why I liked the old solution, but noone seems to know if AmaroK still looks in an alternative location nor how the files would have to be named in order to be found there.
Does any AmaroK developer know how the *amarok* side algorithm looks up the file?
BTW that PDF is down (Error 404 not found)

Matt

AFAIK this isn't possible in Amarok 2 at this moment.
Unfortunately this issue very affected me:

1) In work we have shared music collection (> 800 employees). It's totally unacceptable to pollute whole collection to all other people. (And I think that Amarok should warn before such behavior.) If every person will have special music player which add some unusable files to collection, it will be one great mess.

2) I hate polluting files in my collection even if it's only mine.

Moodbar is killer feature - it's very pity to give up. Only solution is to use Exaile which can exactly what I want - automatically generated moodbar files to my home directory.

In general I would agree with Ales. No write access outside the user's home dir (except the tmp dirs of course). This would met the UNIX tradition and philosophy, but
a. It looks like all users in Ales company have write access to the shared music folder. So why should Amarok ask for the permission? Set correct permissions to avoid this.
b. the mood files have around 3k and are hidden. They are part of the collection in my opinion and therefore should be stored together with the tracks. Additionally simplifies a backup.
c. currently the files are named like the tracks, which makes it difficult to put them in an alternative folder. I have some tracks with the same name in different folders. This would lead to overwriting of the mood files.
Adding the option to select an alternative folder is not the problem, problem will be the naming convention.

m0nk

Dieter Schroeder wrote:a. It looks like all users in Ales company have write access to the shared music folder. So why should Amarok ask for the permission? Set correct permissions to avoid this.

Because people create this collection. It's ok to upload new music, it's not ok to add such quantities of (mostly) useless files, moreover to current directories.

Dieter Schroeder wrote:b. the mood files have around 3k and are hidden. They are part of the collection in my opinion and therefore should be stored together with the tracks. Additionally simplifies a backup.

I partially agree that mood is part of collection. But in this time there are only TWO (of many) players that recognizes mood file - Amarok and Exaile. AFAIK mood in target dir recognize only Amarok. So these files are unusable for almost everybody. Moreover, it's easy to create such files again. And no every has Unix like system - on Windows, these files are not hidden.

Dieter Schroeder wrote:c. currently the files are named like the tracks, which makes it difficult to put them in an alternative folder. I have some tracks with the same name in different folders. This would lead to overwriting of the mood files.
Adding the option to select an alternative folder is not the problem, problem will be the naming convention.

For example Exaile .mood file stores to file in which name is whole path to original file (where / is replaced by -). It's not absolutely ideal (too long names, many files, teoretical collisions / vs -), I think that Amarok 1.4 did it similarily. Maybe Amarok 2 can create the same structure in own cache as is in collection, or use hash from whole pathname as mood file name.

In all cases that would be good, if:
1) Amarok 2 can store mood in other directory than is collection
2) When mood files will be written to collection, Amarok should warn before this (because from option "Show Moodbar in Progress Slider" this is not clear)

This would be very useful.