I've got a pretty sizable number of files and I do not use the built-in tag editor to maintain my collection. Even with the "watch for changes" enabled when I update only the tags within a file (i.e. to update/change the genre) amarok simply does not see the changes until I rescan the files. As far as I'm aware there's no good way to rescan only a very small subset of my collection. The only way I know is to remove an entire parent directory (structured as: Artist/Album/##. Track) from the collection and then add it back in. It is overkill to rescan 1000 files in that parent directory when I only need to rescan 20 files.

It would be much nicer to see an option to rescan a collection group (i.e. genre, artist) based on the current sort in the Media Sources/Local Collection view. If I drill down to a single album, then rescan just that album. If I've selected an artist, rescan all the files in that group.

If you change the configuration of the tagger used to change the time codes of the files re-tagged (in kid3 it's "preserve file timestamp") Amarok should see the change and rescan the dirs.

also, see http://jefferai.org/2010/01/rescanning-single-folders/

Unfortunately you didn't specify which Amarok version you use...

Sorry about that. It's 2.3.1-r2 (KDE 4.4.5) which is the latest from the stable portage tree in Gentoo. I see that 2.3.1.90 is available in the unstable tree but I'm not too keen on running too many of those unless I need to.

The more I play around with this the more I find the only real solution is to touch the album directory (my heirarchy is "<first letter of artist>/Artist/Year - Album/##. Track"). Once I do that amarok is able to update itself automagically. Since I use foobar2000 by way of Wine I don't know that I can change any settings to alter the directory timestamp while updating the files contained within.

I read the URL and gave it a try but it didn't do a scan unless I updated a directory timestamp. And at that point, why bother doing a rescan of an entire group of directories since amarok will do it for me? If I randomly select a directory and choose "rescan" in the collection settings the scan will pop up the progress bar for a fraction of a second and stop without actually scanning anything.

I've created a ServiceMenu to run touch to update the timestamp when I edit the tags in files already in my collection. This will let amarok see the changes and do what it needs to do.