I consider this is more of a bug than a feature request, however the current behavior appears to be by design...

All playable audio files should be added to your collection when scanning directories. I have a large number of files (mostly .m4a, also some .rm and .mov) that amarok will play correctly if i navigate to them in the file browser, but will not ever add to my music collection.

From what I\'ve been able to figure out in the source code, the collection builder discards files when it can\'t get information back from TagLib about them, however, I can\'t figure out enough about how the program works to change this behavior. I think any file that can be played should be added to the collection, whether or not they have any retrievable metatdata. If you really need metadata about the file, you could use the file name as the song name and blank out the rest, and then if the user really wants, they could update the missing information manually.

In the meantime, I think I\'ve figured out how to manually add the tracks that amaroK won\'t recognize to the collectiondb by hand, but it doesn\'t seem like this should be necessary, since it has no problem playing the files once they are in the database.

I guess there\'s some concern that it would clutter up people\'s collection browser to have all the untagged files. Do you have a suggested remendy?

I guess it\'s just a matter of presonal preference then. To me it would make more sense to have all of my media in the database, even if the metatdata is incomplete- After all, I have these files because I want to be able to listen to them.

If nothing else, as I said, having the filename (minus extension) as the song name would be enough for me, but other options might be to try and attempt to make some guesses based off the file name, or perhaps to use something like musicbrainz, if that will work with non-mp3 files. And the user can always edit the information later if they don\'t like having incomplete metadata.

eean wrote:

I guess there\'s some concern that it would clutter up people\'s collection browser to have all the untagged files. Do you have a suggested remendy?

Perhaps an option in the preferences to toggle this feature on? The normal user would therefore be unaffected, but those with large m4a collections could add files with no recognised metadata and we have the best of both worlds

or maybe a hdd stored index/database file containing

either file checksum or dcop path/ filename to identify

with associated array containing artist, title and album.

It will be used to read all m4a file data from one spot. or files that fail to be tagged (readonly media or unsupported)


look up /mnt/music/track01.m4a

filename; artist; title; albums
/mnt/music/track01.m4a; Seal; My vision; Singles

Post edited by: carl0ski, at: 2005/07/03 07:33