Hi everybody, I'm a fairly new linux/amarok user and I am using amarok 2 in Kubuntu 9.04..

I have a question about how to use my collection.. it seems that when I backed up all my music files when I was using windows and the Zune zoftware/Windows Media player that when I backed them up about half the music files got seperated from the album art, what artist/cd the file belonged to etc and it's a big mess on the external HD.  I'm just wondering if I just move individual tracks etc to Amarok if it will clean this mess up somewhat or if I have to do the rest of the artist/information seperately?  This is a huge mess for me because I have a pretty large music collection that I picked up over the last 20 years or so.

Any ideas to help out in my situation?  It's going to be alot of work for me to try and organize all those files.....

Thanks, and I like amarok it's pretty slick.

If you use Amarok to browse the file system and copy or move the tracks into your collection the default is to organize them into a directory structure of:

Artist/Album/Track

: assuming the tracks are properly tagged.

If you prefer to keep the various artist stuff together you could use a different directory for those and create an additional collection that points to that and just keep the:

Album/Track

: part of the rules.

I have not played around with having different organization rules for different collections, so I don't know if the organization preferences are saved on a per collection basis if they apply globally every time you change them.

I think you are stuck having to copy all the album art into the correct directories the old fashioned way.

Later, Seeker

Thats what I was afraid of seeker...


It should only take me a month or so to get things organized again.....  LOL

Amarok is great though.

If by album art, you mean just the covers, I don't think you necessarily need to do anything at all.
If you have an enormous amount of covers, the easiest thing to do is to let amarok retrieve the covers which it does quite well.  You might have to change a few manually but it should be 95% done.

This may be only a temporary solution because the covers are still in a temporary folder but in the past (Amarok 1.?) there have been scripts which copy the cover of the current playing song to the current directory.  If your structure is any sort of logical structure  (/Artist/Disc/) then this will work for you.  Maybe someone will rewrite the script for Amarok 2 (if they haven't already)

I mean, why do the work if you don't need it right now?  Someone may find an easy solution in the meantime.