External drive issue

[Jeff Mitchell]

mark.potter at academy.com wrote:
>
> I do use Gnome by default but I have tried this in kde (3.x and 4.0) 
> to see if it was a Gnome issue and I had the same issues. I actually 
> did that first because Gnome is not kde and Amarok is a kde project. I 
> really wish that Gnome and kde would get along better because my 
> choice of desktop should preclude me from cool features in great 
> software. Before I go off on a cooperation in open source rant I'll 
> stop this train of thought and move on.
>
Gnome and KDE are making strides to work better together -- KDE even 
going so far as to adopt some new "standard" technologies when it 
already had perfectly working (sometimes superior) technologies in 
place.  DCOP vs. DBus for example.  As I understand it, the Gnome folks 
don't generally reciprocate (but feel fine complaining).  But I'll not 
rant either...just know that interoperability is something that is 
definitely desired, but it has to be worked at both ways.

But the reason I brought up Gnome wasn't to say something like, you're 
using Gnome so I'm not going to help you.  The reason I brought it up 
was because we've seen a situation in the past where if you're running 
Gnome and have not started other KDE apps (so that KDED isn't running) 
the MediaManager module doesn't initialize fast enough to answer the 
initial queries to it over DCOP.  So I wanted to see if this might be 
something similar (although that issue was fixed, for the symptoms we 
saw before).

> saved the database of files based on that then I could plug in any 
> drive, scan it, and be good to go anytime I plugged it in and selected 
> the drive. It could even be done by mountpoint on Ubuntu but I realize 
> that won't work everywhere which is why I suggested volume name. I 
> understand the dynamic collection is supposed to work in this manner 
> but it really doesn't. Why not just have the database for each 
> external device saved separately and the devices either grouped with 
> media players or in another drop down/tab somewhere? It would seem to

That's exactly what Dynamic Collection does.  :-)  One thing you have to 
remember though is that if you manually rescan the database (full 
rescan, not an incremental rescan) it AFAIK dumps *all* tracks in the 
database, regardless of what device they were scanned on.  Otherwise it 
works, or is supposed to work at least, exactly as you said -- when a 
device is plugged in and scanned, the scanned info is saved in the 
database.  And since it uses HAL UDIs you don't even need to select 
which drive it was on, it figures it out.

I've been working with Dave Walker off-list to try to sort out his 
troubles.  When he tested it my way, it worked for him too, but it 
seemed to have issues if drives were added/removed while Amarok is 
running, so that might be the culprit.  I'm happy to debug with you too, 
but you'll need to read my earlier posting and send the appropriate info 
over.

--Jeff