I am a raw beginner to Ubuntu. I have tried it several times over the years, but always came away scratching my head. I've now got Ubuntu running in a VMware player on Windows 7. I've listen to a lot of podcasts and usually just download them and then copy and paste them into my Sandisk mp3 player. I've got Amarok up and running, downloading and playing, but I can't find where Amarok is saving the files! Putting them in the "Music" folder would seem like the logical place. Where are they saved?

The database is stored in $HOME/.kde/share/apps/amarok, so are the saved podcasts and playlists, the settings are in $HOME/.kde/share/config/, the configuration files all start with amarok* and are text files.

Amarok doesn't put anything in the Music folder, since that is a user folder, and the applications do not write application specific settings in a user folder in Linux. That is not specific to Amarok, but how KDE on Linux is organised.

Hmm, whats the point of System Settings > Account details > Paths > Music path ?

I really appreciate that it doesn't fill entire My documents folder with unwanted data (as it was in windows era), but having Music path setting, well it makes sense to save podcasts there

It doesn't, since most people don't want their saved podcasts to show up in the collection, and podcasts are very often only saved temporarily.

What if someone wanted to save a podcast -- I have some that I have kept for some time. Is there anything preventing the user from keeping them in the Music or a Podcast directory? Could Amarok access such from some location other than $HOME/.kde/share/apps/amarok?

I have a few podcasts I've kept for various reasons. They are part of my collection, in ~/Music/Podcasts. I can select and play them just like music tracks. It would make sense to put them in /Various Artists/Podcasts, too. For those special ones, you can copy the file path from the Edit Track Details dialog, and move it to your collection. For instance, you could

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mv /home/valorie/.kde/share/apps/amarok/podcasts/On The Media/otm041610pod.mp3 /home/valorie/Music/Podcasts/On The Media/otm041610pod.mp3

to use one of my downloaded podcasts as an example. I would rarely bother to do this, however.

O.K., thank you for the response.

To be sure I'm understanding correctly, everything is by default stored in $HOME/.kde/share/apps/amarok. A specific file (i.e., a single podcast) cannot be directed for storage in a desired other location (i.e., ~/Podcasts) using the Amarok GUI? Or did I miss something.

Rightclick on the podcast > configure > save location?

jglen490 wrote:O.K., thank you for the response.

To be sure I'm understanding correctly, everything is by default stored in $HOME/.kde/share/apps/amarok. A specific file (i.e., a single podcast) cannot be directed for storage in a desired other location (i.e., ~/Podcasts) using the Amarok GUI? Or did I miss something.

As Mamarok said, it isn't in the average Amarok user case. How often does one want to store a podcast long-term? I think I have five, after years of listening to podcasts.

The developers have limited time, just as the rest of us do, so they focus on 1) features they want, and 2) features they know lots of users want. Not only do they not have time to program for the rare use-case, but also believe in the elegance of simplicity. Feature creep is the enemy of simplicity.

Valorie

I understand and am one of "those" who haven't used Amarok since 1.4.(something)

I want my podcasts stored in a different folder mostly because I dualboot. Because of this, I have a partition on which I store all of my media so that I can access it no matter what OS I'm currently booted into. Now my solution to this problem therefore has to put all of my podcasts on this separate media partition. What I did for that was as follows:

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$ cd ~/.kde/share/apps/amarok
$ rmdir podcasts
$ ln -s /path/to/preferred/location ./podcasts


This puts a symlink into the directory where Amarok expects to find it's own podcast directory, and Amarok will put files into the symlink, thus leaving my files where I want them.

Why would you do something so complicated?
Right click on any subscription or episode and select "Configure", you can then put the preferred location for each subscription individually.