Sorry for the long posting of varied topics. I'm new to the forum and didn't know if I should post multiples.

I've inherited a 500GB external USB 2.0 NTFS formatted drive with over 60,000 songs. I'm running openSuSE 11.2 with KDE 4.4 on a 2.8GHz, dual-core, 4GB RAM system. I have several questions regarding Amarok and using an external drive.

I've had issues with keeping the database intact after remounting the external drive. I've read in this forum issues surrounding NTFS and mtime compatibilities. Would it be better to format vFat? I'd like to keep this drive available to Windows systems as well so I'd like to keep from formatting Ext4. However, if using Ext4 will fix issues listed here, I'm all for it.

The music is generally cataloged using a directory denoting the genre, i.e sub-directories of classical, jazz, country, r&b, etc. In the directory Rock & Alternative there are over 35,000 tracks. I first used the external drive as a local collection and found out that creating a playlist based on this R&A genre takes almost 1/2 hour. During that time, my CPU is, for the most part, running @ 100%. Further, saving this playlist takes another great deal of time. Moving the playlist to the current playlist is also equally CPU intensive and time consuming. Short of hacking this directory into many smaller parts, can I do anything about this?

I'm wondering is using stand-alone MySQL would have better performance than using the embedded?

I have very limited options regarding the search directories to use when I use the external drive as an external device as opposed to using the drive as a local collection source. With local collection, I can be very specific on what directory/sub-directory I can use but not when using as an external device. With external device, I can only pick one directory to use as the source. Is there more to this option than I see?

When mounting my external drive and using as an external device, filtered searching does not match on the external device. Simple search seems to match on the local and external, but more advanced searching, i.e. genre, artist, etc. only matches local collection. Is this working as designed?

I've tried many different methods of mounting the drive and using either as an external device, or local music; with and without a symbolic link within my home directory, but can't see major differences in performance issues listed here. Is there a tried and true method to best using a drive of this size?

I'm open to any and all suggestions.

Thanks.

blwallace wrote:Sorry for the long posting of varied topics. I'm new to the forum and didn't know if I should post multiples.

Why did you, then? It would be really nice to split of the parts not relevant to the exact question. Keep it short will get you more answers

To pick just one issue to answer -- it seems to me you are using the static playlist wrong. A static playlist is meant for a set purpose, such as a few hours of music for party, one CD worth, etc.

If you want all of one genre to be played somewhat randomly, use the Dynamic Playlist, and Proportional Bias > Genre. Be sure to move the slider over to 100% if that's what you want. Or you can choose varying percentages of genres, artists, years, ratings, score, playcount, etc.

If you mount your drive before starting Amarok, and quit Amarok before unmounting it, you'll save yourself lots of scanning time.

Valorie

Thanks Valorie for replying. I do like the Dynamic playlists in the latest release - they are relatively fast. I like to have music playing all day and generally put an entire genre into my playlist, select random and let it run. I have multiple genres and in the interest of varying moods I tried to create a list of all Rock, all Jazz, all Blues, etc. This method works for smaller collections but my Rock collection is huge and requires major CPU to parse and/or update. I tried to create decades of Rock, but even that seems to take major time, but is more workable. Maybe my static thinking needs some correcting indeed.

valoriez wrote:If you mount your drive before starting Amarok, and quit Amarok before unmounting it, you'll save yourself lots of scanning time.

Valorie

Hi,

I just migrated from amarok 1.4.10 to amarok 2.3.1 (debian squeeze) and I run to this very problem mentioned some months ago.

I have a laptop and a NAS. When I am not at home amarok is still my preferred application to open streams, mp3s etc., but I won't to prevent it from scanning my music folder if it is not mounted. Is there a solution?

Amarok 1.4.10 kept my collection intact when the NAS was not mounted. If amarok 2 can't do that, this constitutes a quite serious "bug" for me.

Thanks in advance.

Giorgos

This is solved in Amarok 2.3.2 AFAIR

Mamarok wrote:This is solved in Amarok 2.3.2 AFAIR

Thanks [1], although this is good and bad news. Amarok will always be seriously broken for the next debian stable release (squeeze [2]).

Have a nice day.

[1] https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=171213
[2] http://amarok.kde.org/wiki/Download:Debian

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UPDATE
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This is not a resolved issue in 2.3.2, yet, even though the bug is closed. Gonna try to reopen the bug.