Fedora first released Amarok 2.4 before KDE 4.6. So when I first upgraded to 2.4, I still had KDE 4.5 so I didn't have any collection issues. When I upgraded to KDE 4.6, all of a sudden, Amarok lost my collection. After a complete rescan, the songs were back - but without the stats. At least the "ratings" and "last played" were not copied over into the files, so those were lost. The number of plays had been written to the song so that was still there.

I tried restoring from a backup of the .kde/share/apps/amarok folder from before the upgrade and the exact same thing happened. I'd only been using the 2.x series of Amarok since Nov, so it's not a huge loss. What I'd like to know is how to generate a stats backup so that if this happens again when KDE 4.7 comes out (or Amarok 2.6 or w/e) I don't lose my stats again. Those stats and auto-generated scores are the #1 reason why I use Amarok.

Thanks!

You can enable writing stats to file tags:
Settings > Configure Amarok > Collection > Write statistics to file
Playcounts and scores will then be automatically written to the files when they're played, so if the database is lost and rescanned the data is recovered.

That's what I had implemented, but it didn't save the automatically generated scores or the last played time. It did save the star ratings and number of plays.

Same thing just happened to me. Started Amarok after the update, did an "Update Collection", and Amarok proceeded to expunge my entire collection, leaving only a few handful tracks (~24000 to 90).

I'm once again appalled at how cavalier Amarok is about tossing out THE most precious thing it has - the metadata for the tracks. That they are forever lost (unless you have a fresh backup) just from a simple bug or mistake has to be the worst thing about Amarok.

Well, second worst. The worst is how the users usually get blamed when Amarok loses their data. Or someone else. Never Amarok.

"You should have made a backup." is a very convenient answer, but also a very arrogant one. Look at pretty much any other application that is entrusted with data - not only do they often make backups of their own, just in case, but rarely will they just toss out gobs and gobs of data with no warning or recourse.

Amarok, however, will happily trash 24000 entries, with no warning, no recourse, no backup, no nothing.

Yeah, it's the only thing that tarnishes what it's become, to me. It's like KDE itself. The initial 2.0 release was ****. I think the last few releases have been awesome, but to lose data like that..... On the plus side, it now imports my ancient 1.4 data.....

Anyway, please work on this for the future, Amarok devs.