Dynamic Collection

[Tim Bocek]

I've been playing with Amarok 2 since Project Neon came out, and I'm very
impressed with the work that's been done so far.  However, I've got all of
my music on an external drive and, from my experimentation, it doesn't look
like dynamic collections (the feature from Amarok 1.4 which detected whether
media on an external drive was present and, if not, would temporarily
exclude it from the collection) is in place.

The experiment I ran to verify this was to put some files on an external
drive, add that drive to my collection, update collection, rate some of the
files on the drive, quit amarok, unmount the drive, restart amarok.  The
files on the now unmounted collection still appeard in my collection, could
be added to a playlist, but just couldn't be played.  If I perform an update
collection at this point, the files disappear.  If I then mount the drive, I
need to perform a rescan operation (not an update operation) to get the
files back; ratings and playcounts are retained, but the fact that I need to
perform a full rescan on a 100+ GB collection makes this almost unusable.

Several questions: am I missing something and there's an option somewhere to
enable this?  If not, is there a workaround (other than disabling "watch
folders for changes")?  Do I even need to disable this option as a
workaround (in Amarok 1.4 that option would have performed silent update
operations IIRC, but maybe it's different in Amarok 2)?  Also, is this a
feature that's planned for a later release (I know we're in feature freeze
right now)?  If so, is someone working on it?

If the answer to the last question is no, I'd be willing to take a crack at
it, as I've been studying some relevent portions of the code base this
morning.  I don't have any OSS development experience, but I have experience
on other projects and am fairly competent in C++.

Thanks
-Tim Bocek
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