This is Debian Bug#330017 (http://bugs.debian.org/330017), reported by rich lott <rl3@shinyblue.net>. -------------------------------------8<--------------------------------------- If you've updated your collection by adding files / folders while amarok is not running, it takes a couple of mins for amarok to realise, once you've stared it up. I don't konw what the trigger is for it to do this (FAMD?), but anyway, quite often I rip a cd, start amarok and have to wait until it updates before listening to it and it's anoying. ( I know there's the rebuild collection thing, but that seems different to the update collection thing, the first takes forever (big collection) ) just a suggestion! Keep up the good work on an excellent player! ------------------------------------->8--------------------------------------- I agree that having an action in the menu "Update collection", different than "Re-scan collection", and/or an option to run it on startup, would be nice. However, I realize this may not be possible at all if amarok relies on some notifier to determine what directories changed, and can't figure it all by itself. In either case, I'll forward the original submitter whatever explanations you provide. Thanks.
It checks the modified dates of the watched directories every couple of minutes. I don't know if there's a reason why it doesn't do what we call the incremental scan on startup.
I would say we don't need it, because it would add to the overall startup times, and the user only needs to wait 5 minutes maximum for the scan. On Monday 31 October 2005 04:24, Ian Monroe wrote: [bugs.kde.org quoted mail]
5 minutes? Thanks, but I'll use XMMS. Or a CD player. C'mon, this is important, if amarok is anything it's something that saves loads of time by doing stuff instantly that would otherwise take you a while (eg. playlists, showing you your newest tracks - or even just the basic concept of not having to change CDs/tapes/records to listen to the next song). Look at it this way: you rip a cd because you want to listen to it. Because of that you start amarok. You then need to wait 5 minutes? If the "bug" report had been "amarok takes up to 5 minutes to start up" it would be considered a serious flaw, but this is in effect what it means. I need it more than I need it to fetch album covers from amazon which are removed again 30 days later. :)
IMO the best solution to this problem would be simply adding a new item "Update collection" to the menu.
Guys, I really don't get what this report is about. The collection update check is executed exactly one minute after startup. Is that a problem, waiting one minute?
(I respect the decision to close the bug, but personally I feel that one being able to, after adding some files to /mnt/mp3, hit a button and have them instantly appear in the Collection, as opposed that idling 60 seconds over one's thumbs waiting for amaroK to pick them, is a more pleasant user experience.)
I can see a point here. Now that the collection scanner has been redone and is faster, I've set it to run scanModifiedDirs() on startup *iff* it does not start a scan for some other reason (collection is empty, directories to scan have changed). If nothing has been modified in the directories, it should quit without having taken too much time; otherwise it will read in the new tracks. I think this makes sense, but if people are complaining that it takes too much time to start up now, I'll remove this, and you'll have to wait the 60 seconds. (Note: this will be in amarok SVN, and may or may not be backported to the next 1.3.x release...otherwise it will show up in the 1.4 release.)
Jeff has just fixed this: "Make incremental scanner run on startup if a normal startScan hasn't been run. Shouldn't really affect startup time if nothing's changed (doesn't on my box), but will make changes to these directories get caught faster."
(For the record, this was r499792.)