It turns out that amarok as shipped with openSuSe cannot build a database from my about 40k music files. I let it work over night and it hung at about 37% and wasn’t moving any more in the morning. I have never had this problem with amarok in any other distro.
Another annoying issue is that openSuSe seems to ship a crippled version of amarok that does not allow you to replace the sqlite database with mysql or postgresql. (Though this is not the main reason for the severe database problems - other distros can build a database from my files with sqlite in reasonable time as well).
The openSUSE version of Amarok is indeed crippled. You change this in YaST software management by enabling the Packman repository and looking up Amarok 2, changing its respository to the Packman one.
As for the other problem, no idea my more modest 4k were handled fine before. Having problems in 11.1 though, so I switched over to JuK.
@Axeia, the packman respositories thankfully also have an uncrippled version of amarok 1.4 which i was able to install in order to enable amarok to cope with my large mp3 collection.
I also tried amarok 2.0 but found it useless, since many important features from version 1.4 are currently still missing. There is also a bug, which prevents the database from correctly assigning compilation albums to “various artists”. This is also a show-stopper for using amarok 2.0 with large music collections. JuK is much too simple for my needs and not a proper alternative.
@buckesfeld, the inability of amarok 1.4 as shipped with openSuSe 11.1 to cope with large databases is a known issue: there is a thread on this that dates back to the summer and refers to a beta version of 11.1. Unfortunately the fact that the issue was known has not seemed to have caused anybody at openSuSe to do anything about it (or even to allow users to do something about it themselves by shipping an uncrippled version of the software). The issue you are referring to (install mysql as a workaround) has nothing to do with this though. This is an issue with amarok 2.0 which didn’t create a database at all before i installed mysql.
All in all my first experiences with openSuSe have been very disagreeable. I do not mind tinkering around with my system a bit in order to make things work to my satisfaction. But being forced to spend time finding workarounds for errors that have been purposefully introduced (as in this case) is really infuriating. Probably some “usability” fanatic at openSuSe thought that the option of using different database technologies in amarok might be confusing for his dear old granny and decided to remove the options (please correct me if there are other reasons).
As so often, the result of such thinking is a piece of software that is less usable for everyone. >:(
On 12/30/2008 Zebedee66 wrote:
> The issue you are referring to (install mysql as a workaround) has
> nothing to do with this though.
I see, you didn’t mention the version. IMHO the restrictions applied to Amarok in the shipping versions of Opensuse render it so useless, it should be dropped from the distro. I am pretty sure 99.9 % of all users replace it with the version from Packman anyways. Did you try that?
Yes i did. The packman version can’t build a large database with sqlite either (obviously this is not a amarok but a sqlite problem), but it did allow me to replace sqlite with mysql, which solved the problem in the end.