[Feedback] Samba/Windows Share support

Jeff Mitchell kde-dev at emailgoeshere.com
Mon Jul 16 18:49:04 UTC 2007


Mark Kretschmann wrote:
> On Thursday 12 April 2007 09:39, you wrote:
>   
>> Thimios Katsoulis sent a message using the contact form at
>> http://amarok.kde.org/en/contact.
>>
>> I 've been using amarok fro some years now and I think it has nice
>> interface and some very nice features that put it in the top line of audio
>> players .
>> Just some suggestions:
>> 1. Please support samba locations for the media library. I am seeing this
>> as major disadvantage for  most linux programs. Windows , do offer this and
>> you can work with files stored on shares with any program.  However in
>> Linux most programs have difficulties with files stored on shares. In an
>> audio player case , having your audio files in a share is the most common
>> practice.
>> I know I can mount the share and access the files as if they were local
>> but it's not the same. Recently I tried setting up kubuntu 6.10 and amarok
>> with media files stored on a mounted samba share but taglib gave errors
>> about some (20 or so) files..
>> Errors are annoying but having your media library (that includes many
>> thousands of songs) and not  these 20 files that taglib was not able to
>> read is ... priceless..
>> Well instead amarok decided to stop (not only once but several times ) on
>> 50 , 60 , 80 per cent and ... no media library.....
>>     
>
> First of all this is almost entirely a TagLib issue, which handles the 
> metadata reading for us. We have little influence over the way tags are being 
> read. Anyway, here are some tips for using Amarok successfully with Samba 
> shares:
>
> * Use the latest stable version (1.4.5 currently)
> * Check this guide:  http://amarok.kde.org/wiki/Samb
I don't know why this was just marked as new for me, but that's computers...

Anyways, I have all my music on a Samba share and don't think I've ever 
had any missing files.  But I'd blame Samba as quickly as TagLib; Samba 
is a buggy mess.  In either case, make sure you're on the latest version 
of both: TagLib should be 1.4 but ideally (and almost compulsorily) your 
distro should have a ton of patches for it.  For Samba, what you 
actually want to do is make sure you're using a recent kernel, as the 
SMB-handling code lives in there.

--Jeff



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