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Amarok driving you nuts as you try to play music in Linux?
Edit 16 October 2006: Dangit, I rebooted to test something and now this fix no longer fixes the problem. I'm back to not being able to load my music.
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I'm an avid music listener with genres pretty much spanning the whole gamut of music types. As such, it's been very frustrating to me that Amarok (a feature-rich music player) for about a month now has crashed every time I try to scan my collection. The "helpful" error message suggests that maybe "taglib " (a library for reading metadata from MP3, Ogg, FLAC, and MPC multimedia files) was responsible. Okay. After spending a few hours searching I discovered that this issue comes up often in relationship to problems with the SQLite (a simplified version of an SQL database engine) database Amarok uses by default.
Being lazy, I figured I'd wait for an update or two before messing with changing over to a real SQL database, but with each update the music collection load just crashed at a different spot. Finally, I gave up and looked around for what I needed to do to convert over to a "real database," and lo and behold I found some instructions on the Amarok wiki. I didn't need to recompile since I could go to Amarok's Settings -> Configure Amarok -> Collection -> Database dropdown list box and see MySQL listed as an option. I just needed to install the MySQL server and then follow the instructions in the code samples in the document's "MySQL Setup" section. After that, I could go into the aformentioned Collection tab and select MySQL as my database choice. Entering the information it needed to connect and clicking OK began an automatic process of Amarok creating the needed MySQL tables and populating the database.
Great, I thought! Problem solved. Yeah. I loaded the collection when the data move was complete and the load failed again with the same unhelpful message. So, back I went to the Web, where I found a discussion within the Ubuntu forums that set off some lightbulbs. Everyone in the thread was using Samba to host their music collections. So am I. Ah ha. Wouldn't it be nice if the error messages were a bit more helpful here? Anyway, after following many suggestions in the thread I made it back to the Amarok wiki and it's discussion of issues with Samba.
After reading through here I decided that it was the mount permissions that must be the problem, because I had it writable and owned by me already. However, the examples given won't work for me in Fedora Core 5 because the "smbfs" (Samba Filesystem) option has been changed to "cifs" (Common Internet Filesystem), and the format I use is slightly different. So, if your setup is more like mine, then you would unmount your share and then remount it using this format:
mount.cifs //musichost/musicpath /sharepath -o user=yourlogin group=yourgroup fmask=644 dmask=755
I did this, scanned the collection yet again, and it worked! Finally! Am disappointed though that it had to be such a pain to fix. We can do better than this, folks.
unless you changed your fstab your mount would drop on restart. So you
would have to do it again.