Discussion that follows is about Amarok 2.3.0

I had two sets of tracks from the same album, and, for whatever reason, although they had identical metadata in terms of artist, album, genre, and year, they were recorded in the database as two different albums. I couldn't convince it to merge them by editing track details (which are, in any case, correct), so I took it into my own hands and edited the database directly, changing the rows for the tracks so that they all pointed to the same album and deleting the extraneous album. Now they are correctly listed in the local collection as being all a part of the same album, but the tracks are out of order. As a result, when I add the album to the playlist, the "large icon" album details appear more than once. I believe it is programmed to display them whenever the current track is not on the same album as the track before it OR its track number is lower than the song before it.

So, really, what I'm asking is:
1) Is there a better way to merge albums when the track details are already correct?
2) How is the default ordering of tracks determined when adding an album to the playlist? They are not ordered by their id number in the database or their tracknumber...both of these agree and are the correct ordering, but are not the ordering amarok is showing.
3) Is my best hope for getting this stuff all done correctly and automatically just removing the tracks from my collection and adding them again? Or perhaps rescanning the entire collection?

In every case I've seen problems like this in my collection, it was because the metadata was NOT identical. It's a bit tricky to get it perfect within Amarok itself, but it can help to use a tagger such as Picard, EasyTag or Kid3 to retag the album, then touch the album folder from the console.

If you have "Watch folders for changes" checked in the Configure Amarok > Configure Collection dialog, that album folder will be scanned automatically.

For the track ordering, be sure it is correctly entered in the track # tag.

Valorie