My music collection is placed on a USB harddrive connected to my fritz box router. The directory is mounted using /etc/fstab entries and the access is relative slow.

What is the best way to use this collection with Amarok?

Simply access it over the mounted directory is quite slow. A database update needs around two hours. That is a bit awkward, so I quit use Amarok for this a while ago.

Now I read on improved smb support in Amarok 2.5 and hoped for an improvement here. On testing 2.5, the exported smb drive is not visible in Amarok (as a USB stick is), but in e.g. dolphin. So I cannot test if this would help me.

If I'm not mistaken most FritzBoxes have a 1.1 USB port in which case you're buggered. Which box have you got and are you certain that it has 2.0 port?

What has the USB port of the fritzbox to do with this?

The USB port of the fritzbox is not accesible from my linux client, it is only the exported cifs file system, which is mounted on my client.

I believe toad is referring to the speed of access to the storage device by the Fritzbox itself.
A CIFS file system - regardless of how it is accessed (whether by KDE/Amarok directly or indirectly through a fstab mount point) - will always be slow if the device in question has USB 1.1 ports (as they are limited to 11mbps).

I know already that the access is slow. I want to know how best to cope with such a slow access and Amarok. (By the way I looked on the AVM webpage for the 3270 fritz box I use and it has an USB 2.0 port)

The collection is on the fritzbox connected hardrive to be acessible from my linux sat receiver. I mainly use it for playing music in my living room. But I would like to use Amarok for maintaing the collection.

The main problem is I think the update of the database, the playing of songs is fast enough. If I add a new interprete/album to my collection I must rescan the complete collection (around 2-3 hours).

Possible solutions could be:

- Keeping the database local
- Add/Delete single interprete/album directories to/from the DB instead of rescanning the complete collection

What means does Amarok provide here? Other ideas?

As stated, I think you're dealing with a slow USB port and everything you stated points in that direction. However, you still haven't stated the hardware of your FritzBox so there is no telling for sure.

afaik the consequences of that are difficult/impossible to overcome. Only thing I can think of is a cron running amarokcollectionscanner at a convenient time every day.

Hardware is FRITZ!Box WLAN 3270.

A solution could be to keep the database local and just update the changed sub directories (interprete/album), but I assume this is not possible, or?

Hm, I was wrong - it has a 2.0 usb port so that can't be the bottleneck

When I cooked up a samba server using a fritzbox I used freetz and it even streamed DVD isos via wlan just fine. I remember having a nice big swap file on the external disk which helped.

Sorry I couldn't be of help - best of luck.

Running the database locally would probably be a good idea from what I can tell.
If you can, ensuring you have a wired connection between the FritzBox and the computer running Amarok may help performance.