Hello,

I listen to music at home on my desktop with my music data in $home and at work on my laptop with my music data on an external drive.

What is the best way to not only share the music but also the Amarok database between these two machines?

Can I simply put ~/.kde4/share/apps/amarok (or just parts of this directory) on Dropbox and symlink it to its previous location on both machines? May be problematic if two instances of Amarok are active the same time. I think this can be resolved by starting Amarok using a script which creates a lockfile. If this directory is shared amarok probably expects the music files at the same collection two. So I would also be symlinking ~/Musik to /media/external/storage/ on my laptop. Any problems I'm missing here?

Any other ideas you have?

I know about syncing metadata using last.fm but rather prefer a more local approach.

Thanks!

Not a good idea, you better in that case use an external MySQL database that both computers can access.

Why not a good idea?

Using an external MySQL database afaik requires a permanent network connection to that server, something which is not given for my laptop and therefore not feasible.

In order to share the database between computers, should the paths of the files be the same for every computer? Is there any other restriction, e.g. about the devices on which the files are stored etc?

Well, sharing a database means that you can access the database from other computers, but the path settings should be irrelevant, provided that both write to the database with the same rights.

What you can't do is distinguish the source of the tracks, as they will all just appear in the local collection. I assume you have tracks on different computers. And you will get warnings if you have duplicate tracks.