I have 180gb of music on an external hard drive that I want to list in Amarok, but it scans and won't find anything. I am new to Linux, am using Ubuntu 10.10, and want a good alternative to use with my music and ipod. This is becoming very frustrating, please help.

If you want to use the USB device as the main collection, make sure you add the link to it in the Amarok settings. It is highly recommended not to use it as an external collection, since then the USB disk will be scanned like a plain media device which takes very long, depending on the size of the device. Also make sure the disk is aoutomounted on connection.

Of course, this presumes you use Amarok 2.3.2, if not, please see here on ow to update to the latest stable version: http://kubuntu.org/news/amarok-232-backports-PPA

Thanks for getting back to me so quickly, fantastic.
How do I not use it as an external collection? The device is mounted okay, Amarok recognizes it,says it is 80% full,but doesn't know what that 80% is. I am using the latest version, and have it set up in settings. More help would be greatly appreciated.
If you could maybe also give me a basic music setup run through, newbie remember,and does mysql have any bearing on what's going on?

If you add it as the collection location in the Amarok settings, it is not an external collection. Just avoid using it as a media device (using it directly in the Local Music section), since USB is rather slow and takes ages to scan on big disks.

Good news, I finally sorted it out. I checked one of the other topics and added this - "sudo apt-get build-dep amarok",rebooted and voila, finding music. One problem has now started. I wanted to use Amarok as my itunes replacement in Ubuntu but an issue has started. I open Amarok,then plug in iPhone (OS 4.0), it switches on and off a couple of times, but won't mount or show up in Amarok. If I shut down Amarok and then plug it in it mounts no problem. I am assuming it's not supported? Any help would be appreciated.

Your last question is not related to the topic, you should search the forum for similar questions first, and open a new thread if you don't find the answer. Hint: this has been answered quite a few times already

My bad, sorry. Thanks so much for your help, I'll keep plugging away for some help with latest problem.