Re: [gentoo-user] KDE? Get me out of here!

[Alex Schuster]

Alan McKinnon writes:

> On Monday 01 March 2010 18:08:05 Alex Schuster wrote:
> > On the other hand, from time to time I have show-stoppers, and then I
> > cannot use kmail, or no KDE4 at all. And have to invest time to solve
> > this. And there are these annoying things. Like Amarok being very
> > unstable, and taking 5 minutes to start. What the heck is it doing in
> > this time?
>
> Fuck knows what amarok-2x does for the first 5 minutes. I *think* On my
> system it scans the music directory, presumably to find updates that
> happened when amarok was not running. Fair enough, can't argue that,
> but why is it so *slow*???

Yes, it scans the collection, I just verified that by removing a folder 
from my collection. Start-up takes 7 minutes, I guess this also slows down 
my KDE4 start-up even further (strigi also scans some stuff for about a 
minute, along this music files I did not touch in any way). So when I save 
my KDE session I have to remember to quit amarok before that. Of course, I 
also have to remember to start amarok some time after I logged in, so I 
can play music when I want without having to wait 7 minutes first.

This does not feel right...

BTW, a find /data/mp3 -type d takes about a minute. Checking the date of 
the directories to verify they did not alter since the last scan should 
not take that much longer.

Ah, I see the problem. It mainly scans /data/mp3/incoming, a directory I 
have NOT selected as collection folder (but most other directories in 
/data/mp3 are selected). Still, those files do not show up in my 
collection, which is fine - some time ago amarok did index all in 
/data/mp3, even if a directory was not selected.


> Fuck also knows what the amarok devs are doing in general. I still
> can't find a way to move stuff to an mp3 player like the old 1.4
> version did. And the library thingamagij still doesn't always update
> tags, or put tag changes that it itself did into it's own database. It
> gladly accepts any changes you make in the Edit Tags dialog, and tries
> to write them, even if it knows it cannot do it (no support for that
> format, permissions, etc). Then, no warning or message about this.

Ah, this looks familiar, I ran into this, too.

> Depending on which bleeding edge latest-svn commit build you happen to
> get on any given day, this last might or might not tell you something
> in the status bar.

I'm always using the newest version that is not hard-masked. with every 
new version, some things get better, but others get worse. This delays and 
startup times are new to me, but on the other hand I did not get any file 
corruption for a long time.
I do not like the new toolbar though. Where are the stop, forward and back 
buttons? And for the volume control I have to move the mouse in a circle 
around it... or use the scroll wheel, okay. Nah, I liked it better the way 
it was before.


> For all the above reasons, and more, I have switched to clementine
> (it's in portage). It's a Qt port of amarok-1.4 and has equivalents of
> all the music- playing goodness that amarok used to have. It doesn't
> do tags, external players, wikipedia etc etc, it just plays music. And
> you have to tag your music by other means with eg kid3. I can live
> with that. At least it starts and stays up.

Nice! But not for me. I like the wikipedia stuff. And tagging, now that it 
seems to work. And what amarok is supposed to become. Yes, I like it much 
better than the old amarok, it's just that things do not already work 
fine. So I will keep suffering, until some day amarok will not do all the 
annoying stuff it currently does. The day will come! Hopefully long before 
they start coding amarok-3 and all gets worse again. I'll just have to 
wait. And wait.

Thanks anyway for the tip, at least I can use clementine when I see that 
amarok is not running yet and did not do its 7 minutes of scanning 
already.

	Wonko