Is there any reason why I cannot get amarok 1.2.2 to store the album art in the mySQL database instead of in the ~/.kde/apps/amarok/ directory?
When having multiple users logging into the same machine they already benefit from the database, but do each user have to collect their own album art...

Thank you for listening!

At the moment you cannot, but you could change the permissions to the directory and symlink the other users.

Thank you for answering seb,

Is such a feature on the roadmap? At least to me it makes very good sense from a user perspective to keep all such information in one place (ie the database)

Thank you for listening.

No, not on the roadmap. Databases aren\'t great places to store files in general. And the symlink solution is easy enough.

OK... Then how about a feature to define a common images repository for all users, so that they can read (but not modify) the album covers stored centrally, but still remain free to update/override whatever local music they have with their covers?

Makes perfectly good sense (IMHO) for multi-user scenarios where one doesn\'t want novice users to delete/garble the album art, but allows them to read and enjoy the music made available to them... And at the same time maintains flexibility by allowing them to upgrade/change album art locally, without affecting other users.

I too like the idea of this.

I use MythTV to listen to my music in the living room, but Amarok when I\'m using my PC, so it would be nice if Amarok stored the Album art in the same folder as the tracks. folder.jpg seems to be the commonly accepted name for album art, and I know Myth picks up on this.

I am actually going to suggest something a little more revolutionary with regards to metadata storage generally, but will do so on a separate thread.....

My challenge with the way amaroK currently stores the data is that it to mee appears to be a desktop, single-user oriented approach.
The wonderful thing with Linux is it\'s true multi-user environment.

Thus I look to set up amaroK so that certain \"Music Power Users\" are allowed to do the following:
1. Add new MP3\'s to the music library (write access to /media/music directory)
2a. Update TAG in new and existing music (group write access to files)
2b. At the same time update the mySQL database with the relevant information
3. Update the Album art for *ALL* users. Thus it makes perfectly good sense to store the album art in the mySQL database even though it\'s ideally not suited for image/file storage.

At the same time, normal users have full read access to enjoy the music with correct tags, album art etc, without having to symlink here, there and everywhere.
Thus my girlfriend can still enjoy listening to music, transfering it to her iPod, without any of us worrying that she\'ll once again delete the wrong archive (ie. delete my entire CD collection which I\'ve digitalized instead of just deleting a few tracks off her iPod.. say no more..)


In order to make this easier on the database itself, all album art/CD covers imported into amaroK should be re-encoded to as small and uniform format as possible so that they are all the same size, depth etc..

Any take on this from the developers?

I\'d really appreciate it if you could give me some feedback on the MetaLibrarian idea that I\'ve had. It doesn\'t deal with group access to the files themselves but it would allow every user to login to the metalibrarian to retrieve and edit all the metadata of the whole music library. I wont describe it all here but I think it is a fairly sensible idea (tho\' may be missing something!!).

It\'s in this thread: http://amarok.kde.org/component/option, ... 5/catid,9/

Thanks for any feedback.

Col.