One thing that always gets me nervous is when a friend sits down at my PC to play some music, listen to some songs and see if they like a band, or throw some tunes on for a party.  I don't want them skipping songs I like, playing songs I don't overly like, etc etc etc - basically, messing with my database  

A great way to help make me worry-free would be to throw a "DB Write On/Off" button in that will allow you to turn off all writing to the database until you turn the option back on.  This way we could hit the button, let people go wild with our music, and then turn the option back on when we want to Amarok to calculate scores/playcounts and submit our tracks to Last.fm.  I don't think it should keep a history during this time - it should be as if nothing has happened since the "DB Write" option was turned off.

Any thoughts?

I second this. As someone who plays guitar I quite frequently listen to a song several times in a row or jump about the song trying to work bits out. This can really screw with the amorak db scores and submits a lot of **** to last.fm.

sdyson wrote:I second this. As someone who plays guitar I quite frequently listen to a song several times in a row or jump about the song trying to work bits out. This can really screw with the amorak db scores and submits a lot of **** to last.fm.

Another great reason why this feature would be awesome!  I also play guitar when I can, and it does suck playing the same song 5 times in a row just to learn the intro ... and ruin it's stats!

Good idea.

Aaron Cooper wrote:A great way to help make me worry-free would be to throw a "DB Write On/Off" button in that will allow you to turn off all writing to the database until you turn the option back on.  This way we could hit the button, let people go wild with our music, and then turn the option back on when we want to Amarok to calculate scores/playcounts and submit our tracks to Last.fm.  I don't think it should keep a history during this time - it should be as if nothing has happened since the "DB Write" option was turned off.

Any thoughts?

Very good idea - so I don't have to use another player when listening to some embarrassing music I don't want to show off at last.fm or to poison my tasteful db..

So: Vote +1.

Good idea, similar to my post about last.fm submiting -> http://amarok.kde.org/forum/index.php/t ... 162.0.html

"1) Please add \"last.fm button\" which may ON and OFF sending info to last.fm. Button which may by added to toolbars (same as \"stop\" , \"play\" , \"rondomly\" etc). It would be nice IMO..."

Would be good to have both

patpi wrote:
"1) Please add "last.fm button" which may ON and OFF sending info to last.fm. Button which may by added to toolbars (same as "stop" , "play" , "rondomly" etc). It would be nice IMO..."

Perhaps it could be like the Repeat button so that you can click through the options: dB ON / last.fm ON, db ON / last.fm OFF, db OFF / last.fm OFF, db OFF / last.fm ON, ...

These features woould be great!  For me, especially the last.fm on/off would be useful.

you can disable scoring with the following dcop command :

dcop amarok collection disableAutoScoring true

of course, you can enable it back with

dcop amarok collection disableAutoScoring false

this setting is effective until next amarok's restart.
i believe the first stable release this appeared in was 1.4.0.

i'd suggest putting it in a one-liner script which you could call with `scoring on` and `scoring off` for ease of use

edit : ok, the exact commit :
r526791 | illissius | 2006-04-05 19:23:56 +0300 (Wed, 05 Apr 2006)

you can disable scoring with the following dcop command :
...

so then it shouldn't be a problem at all to include a button in Amarok doing the same thing, right?

I'd also like this feature as well as toggling last.fm scrobbling!

A button?

Just do the following

a) go to script manager, disable the running score script
b) Go to settings, disable last.fm submissions

play around

c) do b)
d) do a)

of course that would work, but to be honest: that's about five mouseclicks too much for my personal taste 

I'd actually rather use the dcop script mentioned above than clicking through several menus.

if there was another dcop command stopping last.fm transmissions, i'd actually be quite happy with that - put them together in one script, and I'm just one click away from my dreams...

The dcop-script stuff is really good and shows Amarok's scripting capatibility. So these tips could pretty useful for the original posters - as a workaround for their problem.

However, it is typically (and the worst) OpenSource-Style to more or less say "here you are, the problem/feature you describe is not a problem, because you can program it yourself"... that's the way you drive away users.

Just my 2 cents.

Larx wrote:The dcop-script stuff is really good and shows Amarok's scripting capatibility. So these tips could pretty useful for the original posters - as a workaround for their problem.

However, it is typically (and the worst) OpenSource-Style to more or less say "here you are, the problem/feature you describe is not a problem, because you can program it yourself"... that's the way you drive away users.

Just my 2 cents.

That's exactly what I was thinking. I've noticed it on a number of open source projects. I hope some of the devs have seen this thread and realise a number of users would really appreciate this feature. A toggle option on the Mode menu plus a button that can be added to the toolbar using the Configure Toolbar feature would be great.

originally i advocated for a gui option. even though dcop call is enough for me (except that i keep it in a simple script so that i don't have to remember it...), i understand that in some cases dcop call (or even stopping the scoring plugin) would not be convinient enough.

fortunately or not, amarok developers are similar to developers of some other project in one sense - they try to kill options.
in this case at least it is not about "code it yourself" (especially as somebody already coded it), it's more like "is this option important enough to create a separate gui element for it ? how could it be implemented so that it does not clutter the screen ?"