Amarok/Development/Dynamic Collection

About Dynamic Collection

Dynamic Collection is a new feature which improves Amarok’s support for files which are not permanently accessible to Amarok. It will detect when devices marked as part of the collection (see below for a list of supported devices) are added or removed and make the files stored on those devices available or unavailable in the collection at runtime.

If Amarok is not able to identify the device a file is stored on, it will use a fallback mechanism and behave like pre-Dynamic Collection versions.

Supported Devices

Amarok currently supports the following device types:

• NFS shares
• SMB shares
• Mass Storage Devices: harddisks, USB memory sticks

Why does Amarok not recognize my network share?

At the moment Amarok only supports NFS and SMB network shares. Other network file systems like SSHFS are not supported at the moment, but may be in the future.

If your network share is a NFS and SMB (or CIFS) network share, the problem may be that KDE’s MediaManager, which provides the backend for Amarok, does not correctly detect the network share. This usually happens when the network share was manually mounted and does not have an entry in /etc/fstab. Please add an entry for the network share to fstab. It does not have to be mounted automatically, it simply has to be there.

For more details, see http://community.kde.org/Amarok/Community/Samba#The_Solution

Why does Dynamic Collection not support CD-ROMs or DVDs?

Dynamic Collection currently does not support Cds or DVDs because the developers were unable to find a good algorithm to identify Cds or DVDs. If you have an idea for an algorithm please tell us about it in our IRC-channel #amarok or write an e-mail to the Amarok mailing list [email protected].

Disabling Dynamic Collection

In some circumstances it can be useful to disable Dynamic Collection and restore Amarok's previous behaviour, for example when the collection scanning happens on a different computer. This is needed because the original scanning will create the database with the local device id where a remote computer might have another device id or even no device id at all (if using NFS).

To disable Dynamic Collection, you have to edit ~/.kde/share/config/amarokrc . Add DynamicCollection=false to the [Collection] section, restart Amarok and start a full rescan (from the collection settings page). The folder might be named ~/.kde4/.. on some distributions.

Please note that using the same database by two Amarok instances at the same time might lead to inconsistencies, mostly temporary out of date information in Amarok.