On every minor update the same annoying situation rises. Amarok selects and scans my $HOME.
I DON'T WANT THAT!
Please remove this bug (for me at least) or give the user the ability to uncheck this directory.
This has nothing to do with usability. I've the game Micropolis here and amarok shows me (of course untagged) tracks like a aa aaa oooo, which are sounds out of the game.
Ripping a CD into this directory causes amarok to constantly scanning and adding even the temporarily created wave files to its db. Another issue is the detection of the cover. Amarok of course assigns the cover found to the album, which would be ok. But I move the album after having finished ripping to my collection on an ext. HDD. Amarok now has the wrong path for the cover and shows... none. Ghost entries (Unknown artist etc.) are the most annoying issue; this since 2.0 resident bug is still working fine.
Until now I manually delete the entries in the db, but....
Don't know what's the intention behind this feature. Looks like Windoze to me.
And forget the systemsettings entry. It's useless on notebook.
Btw. I'm on GIT, but that doesn't matter, except that db updates still have hickups.

m0nk

Dieter Schroeder wrote:On every minor update the same annoying situation rises. Amarok selects and scans my $HOME.

Hmm. That really is nasty, and sounds like a bug. We would definitely try to fix this if we can narrow it down a bit.

Normally, Amarok only scans $HOME/Music by default, because this is the XDG desktop standard on Linux (we read this value from Qt, so it gives correct results for all operating systems).

Could you please check your .amarokrc, and look what's in the "Collection Folders" section? Mine looks like this:

Code: Select all

[Collection Folders]
-1=./home/mark/Music


Hello Mark,

I meant $HOME/MyMusic (in my case) of course. Sorry, that was a typo.
I know, that amarok reads out those values, but I don't want that. Really.
Especially, that you can't uncheck this directory.
Could you please explain the advantage of this behaviour to me, as it seems I'm a bit dumb in this case?
I always edit amarokrc and remove the entry, but it's already to late. The directories and optionally existing audio files are in the database. Removing the entry seems only to prevent amarok from removing those entries. So I have to do that manually in the tables.
Please let the user decide, which directories to be scanned.

Regards
m0nk

Especially, that you can't uncheck this directory.

Are you sure? I did it easily.

Amarok doesn't scan that folder here neither, using 2.2-git build of today, KDE 4.4 RC 1 on Kubuntu 9.10

Amarok doesn't scan that folder here neither, using 2.2-git build of today, KDE 4.4 RC 1 on Kubuntu 9.10

BTW I can remember two days ago after ordinary git pull Amarok suddenly forgot where my music collection is situated and only ~/Music folder was checked (and I am always unchecking it).
So I had to manually set my music folders again and rescan collection.
Thanks god this was enough.

SeaJey wrote:

Amarok doesn't scan that folder here neither, using 2.2-git build of today, KDE 4.4 RC 1 on Kubuntu 9.10

BTW I can remember two days ago after ordinary git pull Amarok suddenly forgot where my music collection is situated and only ~/Music folder was checked (and I am always unchecking it).
So I had to manually set my music folders again and rescan collection.
Thanks god this was enough.

Exact.

After db version updates, amarok looses its collection and checks only %HOME/xdg-path-of-your-system-settings and I'm not able to uncheck it. I had to exit Amarok and remove the entry in amarokrc. Then I add the real path (on the external HDD) and do a rescan.
But collection handling was the problem under 1.4 and seems to become it under 2.x again. Although this is one of the main reasons for a software like Amarok.
Mark often states to move the db out of the way and rebuild it, but that can't be the solution. Any gathering of statistics is senseless, until you can make a usable backup (or recover your stats from let's say last.fm).
After a version update of the db your old backup is useless, so why create one? Meanwhile I don't care about Amarok's statistics anymore. They live so short and die so young.
For me this is the most important and also the most annoying point in an exiting and surprising piece of open source software.
I can live with the little hickups (iPod issues, the layout discussion etc.). But if the heart doesn't work, what's the software worth then?
Oh, and please be a help to the users. "Update to latest version" and "Rebuild your collection" are the most mentioned answers here. Hello...?
A bit off topic now, so I better stop.

Regards
Dieter

Dieter Schroeder wrote:
::snips::

Oh, and please be a help to the users. "Update to latest version" and "Rebuild your collection" are the most mentioned answers here. Hello...?
A bit off topic now, so I better stop.

Regards
Dieter

Dieter, what better advice can one give? The most up-to-date version, with more features and less bugs is almost always the best choice. And rescanning the entire collection lets Amarok know all about your collection, including any changed filenames, places, organization, or tags. This is the same in any computer program, really.

Doing these two things solves a LOT of problems. Maybe most.

I'm with you on a better way to save statistics. I'm very sad every time I lose mine. A built-in "back up statistics" function would be a very good thing.

Unfortunately I'm not as half as long in this business as you ;-). But there could be reasons why a user can't/won't update. And following the advice to update should solve the problem, but in most cases the reason for the issue is unknown and updating might help or not, as in my case. So you can update for a very long time, until your issue is fixed by chance.
Don't get me wrong, I'm using GIT and that's my risk, but the average user uses the packages from her distro (which might or might not be buggy, too).
Seems, that some of my advices were helpful in the past. But now most questions recur as do the answers. Or just rants, not worth an answer.
I'm tired now.

Regards
m0nk

Dieter Schroeder wrote:Seems, that some of my advices were helpful in the past. But now most questions recur as do the answers. Or just rants, not worth an answer.

Nah, please have some patience with us too. We developers are under a lot of stress, we're currently on a 6 weeks release cycle (it's pretty much the shortest of any bigger software project), so we are crazy busy.

Please excuse if we are sometimes a bit short-fused, it's difficult to handle all this stress. Thanks for understanding.

PS:
If you are interested in getting an insight into our development process, I wrote an article about it:

http://amarok.kde.org/blog/archives/114 ... 2.2.1.html