External media handling

[Dave Walker]

Actually, it doesn't.

Don't get me wrong; I use amarok because it's the best music player
I've yet found for my linux box. But it would be kind to say that it's
use of the database is, well, quirky.

Lord knows I've cussed applications that do the "Are you sure you want
to delete?", "Are you really, really sure you want to delete?"
routine. But ye gods, to have the amarok drop your entire music
collection because you forget to mount the network drive before you
run it is just crazy! Since I learned that it does that, I've wrapped
the app with a kdialog script that checks for the mount before running
amarok, but I've still lost my collection database more times than I
care to count because of this.

The bulk of my music collection is stored on an MG-35 usb hard drive
that lives in my entertainment center. It's not a bad little unit; the
interface is quirky, the playlist function is virtually non-existant,
but it stays there because it also serves as a video player. It uses a
proprietary network interface called ndas that's pretty slow by modern
standards. However, if it's being used as a usb drive it's pretty
snappy. Problem is that you can't have both interfaces plugged at the
same time. Because of this, it's not possible to automount it at boot
time. So if I've had it hooked up to another computer as a usb drive
to rip a dvd or two, and forget and fire up amarok on my laptop...
there goes the collection again.

And because of the way devices are used in conjunction with
mountpoints in the queries, I can't rescan the collection on the fast
usb bus. That only takes a minute or three. I have to scan it over the
network interface or I get the "not in collection" error in the
context view, even though I've just played the song FROM THE
COLLECTION. And that takes over 45 minutes. So losing the database
because the drive isn't mounted is a royal pain-in-the-ass.

I now do a mysql dump as soon as anything is changed in my collection,
and have written a script to restore the latest dump when (not if)
amarok drops the collection again.

It's frustrating. Maybe it's my mindset. Because of SOX regulations, I
literally have to go through three layers of management at work before
I can make ANY change to our production database. And nothing is ever
deleted from it. Marked closed, canceled or inactive, maybe. But NEVER
deleted.

I wish my C++ skills were stronger so I could offer help rather than
just bitch, but I haven't used the language since my college days in
the early 90's, and it seems to have changed quite a bit since then. I
would like to see some type of flag added to either the album or
uniqueid tables that says "Ask before you drop this from the
collection". Or maybe a bit added to the device table that does the
same thing; "Don't drop songs from this device even if it's not
mounted."

But in my opinion, Mark has a legitmate gripe; a user should never
have to REscan a collection. Ever. And his suggestions probably make
more sense than my bit-twiddling in the tables.

But, finally, THANKS for what is a mostly great player! I've honestly
logged hundreds of hours listening to it (mostly in my cube at work.)
I just wish it wouldn't trash my collection so often. I'm going back
to lurk mode now.

On Thu, Feb 21, 2008 at 5:27 PM, Jeff Mitchell
<kde-dev at emailgoeshere.com> wrote:
>
> mark.potter at academy.com wrote:
>  >
>  > I have 3 external drives on which I have different parts of my music
>  > collection. One is at work, one is a travel drive, and one is 500GB I
>  > use at home. I would like to know if there is a way to preserve the
>  > collections by drive name or some such since it pretty much sucks
>  > having to scan the collection every time I plug in at a new place. Any
>  > advice would be greatly appreciated. As far as a feature request I
>  > think it would be awesome to be able to save collections by volume id
>  > which would solve my problems very nicely. I am hoping there is just
>  > something I have overlooked that already handles this.
>  Amarok already does this since, I don't know, version 1.4.2 or so.
>
>  --Jeff
>  _______________________________________________
>  Amarok mailing list
>  Amarok at kde.org
>  https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/amarok
>



-- 
Dave Walker