Amarok Blog

Entries from Sunday, June 21. 2009

Sunday, June 21. 2009

MySQL Server Support -- Promised and ... Posted by Jeff Mitchell in jefferai at 05:54

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MySQL Server Support -- Promised and Delivered

We told you it was coming. Sure, that was a while back, so you probably thought we forgot about it. Or maybe you thought we were simply playing politics, tossing empty promises to our users.

Well...you were wrong.

It may be a bit later than planned -- we wanted to have it in time for 2.1, but it didn't happen -- but as of revision 984572, there is now support for storing an Amarok database on a MySQL server instead of the embedded MySQL database. There's no configuration dialog in the GUI yet, but it's pretty simple to set up, as explained below. All you have to do is add a few things into your amarokrc file and make a valid user on the MySQL server instance of your choice -- you don't even need to create the database yourself. (In fact, you shouldn't -- you should let Amarok create the database so we can ensure that the character set and collation are set right.)

Here's how to do it.

Update to at least r984572 (of course, updating to the latest revision is probably your best bet).

Wipe your build dir clean and rebuild. Not necessarily necessary, but as 47 files were changed in that commit, it's not a bad idea.

After install, run kbuildsycoca4 --noincremental, just in case.

On your MySQL server, run a command like: "GRANT ALL ON amarokdb.* TO 'amarokuser'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'mypassword'; FLUSH PRIVILEGES;" Be sure to substitute for "amarokdb", "amarokuser", "localhost", and "mypassword" as appropriate.

Open up your amarokrc file, usually in ~/.kde4/share/config/amarokrc. Add a [MySQL] section:
[MySQL]
UseServer=true
Database=amarokdb
Host=localhost
Password=mypassword
User=amarokuser

Close the file and start Amarok. It should create the database and start a scan of your files. If you want to switch back to the embedded collection, simply set "UseServer" to false.

Pretty easy! Be sure to let me know if you have problems -- file a bug and assign it to "mitchell" at a domain of "kde" plus a dot plus "org".

Sunday, June 21. 2009

UTF-8 and Your Music Posted by Jeff Mitchell in jefferai at 05:32

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UTF-8 and Your Music

A heads-up on something new in Amarok SVN (and coming in 2.2 for those of you not living on the bleeding edge):

We've had various bug reports over the years relating to character sets and collation, causing issues with matching searches for music or mis-sorted items. Well, hopefully no longer.

When you update to 2.2 (recent SVN users, see the note at the end of this post), your Amarok database and tables will be converted to use the 'utf8' character set and 'utf8_unicode_ci' collation as default for any table or column created from this point on. Every single text/varchar field will also be converted through a two-step process to use 'utf8' as the character set (the data inside was always UTF-8, but there was a possible mismatch between what the data was and what the database thought it was, if your mysql wasn't built to use 'utf8' by default). In addition, the character set used when talking to the embedded server (the protocol in the socket) will be 'utf8'.

Fixing this mismatch between what the server might have been using for character set/collation and the data we're putting in there should hopefully ensure that sorting and tags work very well for our users with some files wth non-Latin1 tags (probably just about everybody these days).

* Recent SVN users: if your build date is earlier than this post I'd recommend wiping your mysqle directory (not just a full rescan), as the initial commit of the updating code contained a bug that could possibly cause trouble down the line with user playlists...but you bleeding edge users should be expecting database wipes every now and then