Amarok is a great music player for Android devices. It has a lot of features and is easy to use. One way to speed up Amarok is to add large music collections into it. This will help you keep your music collection organized and easy to access. To add large music collections into Amarok, first open the app and click on the “Music” tab. Then, click on the “Add New Collection” button. Enter a name for your new collection and select the size of your collection. You can also choose to have all of your songs in one place or individual songs can be added at a time. Once you’ve chosen your size and collected all of your songs, click on the “Create Collection” button. This will create a new collection with all of your songs in it. You can now access all of your songs from this new collection just like any other collection in Amarok.

The problem is that the default embedded database uses sqlite to store the collection information, which doesn’t scale quite as well as a dedicated database such as MySQL… so we’ll switch to use that instead.

Configuring MySQL for Amarok

These instructions assume that you don’t already have MySQL installed. If you are already using it, then just skip the first couple of steps.

Assuming you are using Ubuntu, run this command from a terminal to install the MySQL server and client on your system:

For security’s sake, you should probably set a root password for your MySQL server using this command:

You can use the “flush privileges” command or just restart MySQL:

Next we’ll use the mysqladmin command to create a database for Amarok to use:

The final command line step will setup the user account for Amarok in MySQL. Make sure to use a different password here.

Configuring Amarok

GRANT ALL ON amarokdb.* TO amarok@localhost IDENTIFIED BY ‘amarokpassword’;

FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

Open the Amarok configuration dialog via the tools menu and then pick the Collection icon on the left.

Change the drop-down to MySQL, and then enter in your details:

Hostname: localhost Database: amarokdb Username: amarok Password: password from step above

Close out of the dialog, and then you’ll have to rescan your collection to move everything into MySQL, which might take a little while the first time.

Enjoy the speedy searching!