Amarok 2 transition from 1.x

[Luis Pabón]

Hi guys,

I posted this yesterday at the dot, and I was advised to perhaps come over
to the list too, so I apologise if anyone has read it already.

Amarok is my favorite audio app ever. IMO much better than iTunes, not only
in features, but also in performance, specially with large music libraries.

There is one thing that for me has been flaky through all these years (and
I've been using Amarok since 0.x), and that's the collection management,
specifically safeguarding this data.

Sometimes when updating from 1.x to 1.x+1 the collections got wiped out. Or
certain scripts can bugger up your collection (mp3fixer does this for me,
after fixing a file it rescans the collection and somehow it loses 20% of
the tracks; how is this allowed to happen?).

If you change the partition where you store your music files, they won't
appear anymore on the collection, unless you rescan (which sometimes loses
all your playcounts and ratings) or hack into the database to modify UUIDs
in a few places. Mind you, unless you use MySQL there is no quick and easy
way of doing this in sqlite.

There is also no easy way of backing up the collection database
(images&database itself). There is a script at Amarok's wiki that I edited
sometime ago to dump the database (MySQL) and amarok's config, but that's
it.

I've got a 16K songs collection, and around 6K of them are rated (manually).
This is a huge amount of work, however it does pay off when using them
dynamic playlists :)

So I'm concerned about the migration from 1.x to 2.x. Will it respect all my
ratings? What about the album covers (many of them added manually, being
copyleft music you won't find them in Amazon)? Playlists, iPod
configuration, Last.fm settings... ? In short, has this process been thought
of and streamlined already? Is there a stablished migration path? I do
realise that the tech preview I tried two months ago was a bit too green,
but I tried simply copying over Amarok folders etc and it didn't work...

Many thanks,
Luis Pabón
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