I launched Amarok for the first time in a long time after installing Kubuntu. I definately like the updated look.

Unfortunately, it took me a grand total of about 30 seconds to get myself into a situation where I can see a bunch of my music, but not play it. In fact, I have no obvious method for solving the problem. Here\'s what I did to get here...

1) Ran Amarok, followed through the initial wizard, did not import any collections because I don\'t have my network shares mounted yet.

2) I opened Konqueror, browsed via smb to my multimedia share, found several folders I wanted to import.

3) On a whim (actually, because I bought a Mac 3 months ago and it\'s become second nature to do these sorts of things), I grabbed the folders I wanted and drug them to Amarok. It churned for a few seconds, then...

4) Success! My music is there!

5) OH, WAIT, NO IT ISN\'T. My music only appears to be there. I can see it, I can see titles and the \"play\" button is able to be clicked, but nothing happens except it tells me I have to import it into a collection or some such.

I clicked the button that it seemed to indicate I should click, but once again, I don\'t have those folders mounted or anything so I can\'t import that music that I have visible in the playlist. That I can\'t play. Because I can\'t import them. Even though I can see it and it\'s in a playlist.

That doesn\'t even make sense, does it? Does anyone else think this is a problem?

So, I found a menu item labeled \"Import Media\". Aha! Upon trying it I was greeted with the capability to browse right to the network location where my music is. Too bad for me that it STILL WON\'T IMPORT IT.

While I appreciate the hard work you guys do and I understand there\'s bound to be network issues but this situation is simply untenable. It\'s wrong. If you can\'t import music this way, then don\'t let them drag and drop the files onto the application. If you can, but can\'t for network drives, CHECK FOR THAT. If you can\'t import music from anywhere but the current drive, then don\'t give me the impression that I can import music from other places.

As it is, novice linux users stand a very good chance of dragging their files from their the box of their lovely wife (where they stored their music for safekeeping while reformatting their own box to Kubuntu or Suse or whatever), then finding out it just simply doesn\'t work and there\'s no way to fix it.

About that time, they\'ll try another distro. Then go back to windows.

From what I can tell basically your problem is that amaroK failed to play the files.

amaroK would have done everything you expected, but because playback failed and you apparently didn\'t get an error message, you assumed you\'d done something else wrong.

The fact that you didn\'t get an error message is engine dependent, sorry about the fact you didn\'t. Try the xine-engine, it always gives good error messages, and generally always works too.

Can I confirm, are you using amaroK\'s live-cd and what engine were you using? I suspect gstreamer-engine.

Post edited by: mxcl, at: 2005/04/26 02:53

I don\'t think this is related to the LiveCD.

I too am having similar problems (exact problem). I am working on a laptop with SuSe 9.3 Pro installed. This is connected wirelessly to my home network workgroup. My music is on an external USB2 HD connected to a Windows XP Pro desktop server. I have shared the Music directory on the external HD in Windows XP. I can see the music with SuSe under smb://desktop-server/Music. I can also browse to it with amaroK and put files in the playlist. I press play and...NOTHING!

Is there a way to do this? Most people don\'t keep 64GB worth of MP3\'s and WMA\'s on their laptop (hense the great market for external devices). If remote serving and playing of music can\'t be done with amaroK, a grand shortcoming indeed. If it just can\'t be done with Linux...hello again Mr. Gates, how ya been.

As an aside, I have no clue how to have SuSe mount the external source upon boot up so that it shows up just like a HD on the laptop.

-WoMBaT

xine does not play from smb:/ gstreamer does. Does it work if you change to the gstreamer/arts engines?

Give Mr. Gates my regards.

Does that mean that it is indeed impossible to use amarok to access files on a networked machine? Even if it is an nfs mount?

I\'m trying to build the collection doing just that - and am not having luck... seems to run for a while then hangs...

This would indeed be a \'glaring usability problem\' though I will just go to a different music manager... on linux.

Thanks for any info.
Mike

hmm, there has to be something wrong then, because I have no problem accessing my quite large collection on an nfs share. Can you give more info about your setup, like file permissions on the nfs shares and which distro you are using.

hows about instead of using Konqueror KIO smb://
for adding mp3\'s

use

mount -t smb \\\\computer\\shared /mnt/sharedmusic


i could never use files from the smb:// without either caching IE. xine player copies an entire file from the network to /tmp before it can play it.
however it will stream from /mnt/shared an actual mounted logical block device.

I think it isn\'t network related. On my Kubuntu 5.10 Preview (Amarok 1.2.4, xine engine, KDE 3.4.2), when I try drag&drop mp3\'s from my local FAT32 drive in Konqueror to Amarok playlist, it does exactly the same - I can see the song - but only name of the file, no tags and the time of the song is \"?\". And of course, no music...

amaroK requires all mounts to be RW, RO will not be added to collection... this is due to taglib.

Does this apply?

Yes, that\'s it! So due to the taglib restrictions, I can safely drag$drop only from my Home folder and any other RW- mounted drives... Not from CDs&DVDs, sometimes not from RW mounted FAT32 Windows partition - \"read-only\" attribute is obviously translated into R-- permission - despite the umask=0000 option in the fstab... files copied from Windows-burned CDs&DVDs detto... :unsure: