Version: 1.0.1 (using KDE KDE 3.2.3) Installed from: FreeBSD Ports OS: FreeBSD Hello Amarok developers, Since I have quite a lot of music on a (relatively) small hard disk, I burn a lot of MP3/OGG files on CDs. Unfortunately, Amarok has no support for them in the collection. It would be nice if one could add CDs to the collection, and when their tracks are added to the playlist Amarok pops up a dialog box saying that you must insert the CD. A disk cache would also be fine, so that you don't have to change CDs too often...
*** Bug 101125 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 94558 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** This bug has been confirmed by popular vote. ***
*** Bug 100585 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 111494 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 114210 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 115599 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 122332 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 123598 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 123678 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 124999 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Just a note on a possible solution. Many bugs have been filed that go into the same direction as this bug and therefore marked as duplicate, but I guess many of us would just be happy with a "don't be forgetful" option, without the dialog and checking "what is where", as mentioned above. I would be perfectly happy, if amarok wouldn't forget my nfs share, if wlan is down.
Yes, I've turned off the scan folder for changes option to get around that. What could also be good is an Amarok dialog that allows automounting of remote shares. It would make it nice and simple, as its a pain having to run a script to connect to your collection, I've tried automount myself but can't seem to get it to work for me, (yet).
An option to never automatically remove songs from the database would be nice. There could then be a manual "Purge deleted files" option which could prompt the user, giving them a chance to connect/mount any media partitions. Wouldn't solve the case of having songs scattered across many CDs, but would make things a little easier for those who have their music on external drives. As things are now, I often start up another music player if I just want to play some music and not have to wait several minutes for Amarok to delete my entire database.
I'd expect it might not be too hard for Amarok to check if the selected mount point was actually mounted or not and then decide whether to scan for folder changes. As for CD's I don't personally think I'd want to have music in my list that wasn't somewhere that was accessible, there could be an import option for those, but I don't personally see the point.
Well I would certainly be interested in having this functionality in Amarok. Not everyone has a big harddrive and CDs/DVDs could be a good alternative if there was support in the player. Cheers Martin
Amarok can find out if a mount point is external or not. The disk is removable, the mount point is a cdrom, etc. For a given song, if the mount point is missing then simple mark the tracks as "offline". If the mount point is someplace else, then Amarok can do a quick check to see if the files look the same. If they look the same, then just change the location in the DB and keep trucking. If they have changed then ask the user what to do. Fingerprinting songs so that Amarok could find them again, in case they moved about would help this too. A fingerprint would either have to be something like an MD5Sum of the music portion of a file or a unique identifier stored in the tags or some combination. Using a file-system extended attribute would work too. For media that remains always mounted, it would still be handy to have Amarok keep info on the file after it disappears, matching fingerprints if it shows up later (say, on a disk or it has been renamed). Use Cases: Alice has a large collection of music files spread around CDs and USB devices. She plugs or mounts one of these devices and Amarok realizes it and immediately populates the list of music available to play. Bob is fanatical about keeping his filenames in sync with their ID tags. He has tools to manage the exact filename. He runs these tools every so often, which causes the filenames to change. Amarok figures these changes out quickly and doesn't loose any of the stored (Amarok only) data. Chuck stores some songs on his laptop, but most are on an NFS mount at his home WIFI network. When he isn't on his home WIFI, he sees only what he has on the laptop. At home, he sees his whole collection. David has lots of friends with iPods. He likes to mount them on his laptop and the music with Amarok. Amarok scan the mounted media quickly and lists it with incomplete information. As Amarok scans the iPods, the ID tags are filled in. I hope these cases help. Ciao!
it seems that quite a lot of people still don't know about two awesome features that work in tandem to keep your stats even with your files moving around :) these silent heroes are... atf & dynamic collection ! most of use cases mentioned here already work with latest amarok svn revisions (and also something works in latest betas, i think). some problems might arise with files that are not supported by atf or are read-only (and without uid tag), but overall these things are already implemented - and they are working pretty nicely here ;) you can find some more information on these goodies her : http://amarok.kde.org/wiki/Advanced_Tag_Features_(ATF) http://amarok.kde.org/wiki/Dynamic_Collection the page about dynamic collection does not reflect current state of amarok, but it should you give the understanding of the idea. now, the use cases : 1. well, this one should work. not sure how well the cd part is implemented right now, though; 2. yep, works for some time already. 3. yep, works 4. didn't fully understand this one, i must admit ;)
Oh yeah, we forgot to close this report. ATF and Dynamic Collection (available in svn) solve all these issues. Have fun :)
Thanks for the reply. I only have 1.4, so I didn't know about the SVN features. Use case four should probably be a separate bug. The motivation for me is that when I suddenly add 3000 files to Amarok, it takes a while to scan them. I'd rather have Amarok collect the file names and fill in the tag info *after* finding all the new files. I can't wait for the next release of Amarok. Ciao!