I've been using amarok as my main music player since I was introduced to it two years ago.  When I learned of the sharing features with the MySQL database, I was even happier.  It has, however, for some reason stopped working.

I have a desktop/server with my collection which I share with NFS on my lan and with sshfs when on the move.  I use mysql for the database and can connect to the database from anywhere.  The collection shows up fine on the server but shows up empty on the laptop.  The version of amarok is the same on both computers, 1.4.4 from Guru (I am using suse 10.1 if that matters), the path to the collection is the same on both computers so everything should just work.  I have had problems when the versions are not the same on both ends, but now they are and I am totally lost.

Does anyone have any suggestions on what to do?

did you use the same login/db info on both machines? Also, make sure you have "watch for changes" disabled on one or both, and manage your db building manually.

More tips on the amarok wiki, which I suspect you've already looked at -
http://amarok.kde.org/wiki/MySQL_HowTo# ... L_Database

Apparantly this is a feature but not a bug, there is an additional device_id in the database so two instances of amarok can use the same database without messing with each other libraries.  This is kind of stupid since I would just use another database if that is what I wanted.  I just built the database on the laptop and I can now listen to the music, but I have two seperate ratings and such for each computer.

do you have documentation for this? afaik, sharing a database between machines should work, unless it's something that's been broken by the introduction of dynamic collections. Some more info on where you found it was a feature and not a bug would be great, as I'm considering moving back to a shared db (I've had it working successfully here in the past).

I have no information that this is a feature other than my setup not working as it should be.  I looked at the database for the songs and saw that they have a column named device_id.  I also noticed that all of my songs were listed twice, once for the laptop and once for the desktop.  Why that is, I do not have a clue.  I don't even know whether this device_id is to label different instances of amarok or something entirely different.  I was just frustrated when I wrote this entry and was not careful when choosing my wording.  English is not my first language .

What is a dynamic collection?  I might have introduced it and broken my database.

I have also had it working succesfully, but something I did just broke it.  It might have been associated with some upgrades, but I have had trouble with connecting to the same database with different versions of amarok, and that does not work.  That, however, only ruined the database, but did not result in this double entry database I have now.

Have you tried with a completely new database at all? There might be relics from older versions causing probs. The only reason I mention dynamic collections is that that's what keeps track of collection devices (to allow for removable drives). It's possible that the device ID for your music collection is different on the different machines, but I'm not sure how this is worked out. I suspect that even with mount points being the same, it's possible that the presence or absence of devices on various machines could affect the actual ID. It might be worth posting a bug report about this - or perhaps mail the amarok mailing list (amarok@kde.org) and ask whether it could affect database sharing.

Since noone bothered to post he followup here...

http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=136826

You can disable Amarok's dynamic collection by adding DynamicCollection=false to the [Collection] section of your amarokrc (on both computers), which will restore  the pre-Dynamic Collection behaviour.

If you want to use Dynamic Collection, you can mount the NFS share on computer #1 using the same server name as on computer #2.