How to speed up amarok searching and playback. 

Amarok is the best audio managment software in Linux today! However as my collection grew it suddenly became slow and unresponsive.

Everything would lag, from playing a song to adding a song to the playlist. No tweaking did or ever would work so I I went over to exhaile for a while. Then I bumbled through this excellent fix for amarok with large music collections.

I remembered when I was setting up Amarok that it let me chose a database, and said the faster ones required extra set up. Of course, I chose the simplest set up required (SQLlite), and all was well. but slow speed eventually meant I had to reinvestigate mysql.

After some spelling mistakes now everything works as fast as it should. 

 

• Lets get the MySql files first:
  

 sudo apt-get install mysql-server mysql-client

If prompted during the setup choose a root password for MySql (This is not your user or sudo password). If not go on:

• Now this; (replace PASSWORD with your newly created password)

 mysqladmin -u root password PASSWORD

 

 

• then we configure MySql. PLEASE be aware of upper and lowercase - and the semi-colons at the end. These are crucial!
  

mysql -p -u root
CREATE DATABASE amarok;
USE mysql;
GRANT ALL ON amarok.* TO amarok@localhost IDENTIFIED BY 'put your password here and keep the quotes in place';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
QUIT;

• In Amarok, go to settings> configure Amarok

• Click Collection

• Select MySQL.

Use the following settings:

Hostname: 127.0.0.1
Database: amarok
Port: 3306
Username: amarok
Password: Your Password with no quotes

That is it. If you have kept to the correct spelling you now have a speedy amarok setup!