I’ve been using Amarok for months to manage and listen to my digital music collection. I really like the interface. And I like the ability to manage my collection, add and manage tags and import music into my collection. Yesterday however, it lost my collection. My music is still all there.
I was importing some music into my collection and the entire collection disappeared from the left panel. I could still view the files and I could still play, but the collection panel was empty. I ran Rescan Collection, it progressed to about 82% and then quit. I searched all over and this appears to be a common problem. And it doesn’t seem to matter if you’re using MySql as I am or sqlite. I tried all the suggestions posted to the amarok forums, nothing worked. I basically wiped out all my amarok configuration files and started over, with the same result.
So I checked around and found there is an IRC channel #amarok. I thought I would give that a try. Although there were a lot of people in the channel, no one responded to my questions. Finally a smart-ass posted and said that I should try something else since Amarok was bad software. Although I wasn’t quite ready to accept this at face value, I was somewhat surprised that someone would make a statement like this on a support channel.
I continued to search for a solution, to no avail. It seems there is a bug in Amarok that causes it to fail to manage the collection list once it gets to a certain size, or if it encounters a file with some kind of error. I even ran amarokcollectionscanner manually to see if I could spot an error. Nothing appeared, though it seems to not complete scanning the entire collection.
I checked and it appears that my MySQL database is intact. It looks like, for whatever reason, Amarok can’t or won’t access it.
Finally out of frustration, I started looking at other applications. So far Rhythmbox seems to be working well. It does most all the things that Amarok does. It doesn’t seem to have the tagging capabilities that Amarok has, but it sees and displays my entire collection, so that’s a start. I’ll continue to look at other applications to replace Amarok. I’ll write about it when I have time.
Update: I went from Etch to Lenny and tried Amarok again. This time it scanned my collection and rebuilt everything just fine. Probably a bug in the old version that’s been fixed. I’m happy.