Sunday, January 18, 2009

[SOLVED] Amarok lags on every song or volume change

Since I reinstalled my Kubuntu Hardy (to Interpid Ibex -> Jaunty Jackal alpha -> back to Hardy), my Amarok started to lag heavily on every song change/volume control or basically any other action. I thought this is somehow connected with the new version of Amarok, with Compiz Fusion, and I even changed to Gnome from KDE to test it. Amarok was still lagging the same - Amarok window slowly fades out, stands still for ~5-6 seconds, and then unfreezes.
Finally, I've found what was causing the trouble: SQLite as Connection Database. It seems that Amarok stores every configuration parameter in a database - so every configuration change invokes long and lagging cooperation with SQLite. With other databases (like MySQL) it's way faster.

How to fix it: 
  • Go to Settings->Configure Amarok
  • Switch to Collection tab
  • Under Database choose MySQL:
    amarok no lag database selection mysql
  • Specify your MySQL credentials. If you don't have MySQL server running on your machine you'll receive an error message like this:

    amarok error window - MySQL server not found
    So you can either setup a MySQL server on your machine, or just ignore the messages - but trust me, no matter what you choose it will be a small price to pay for the joy of having that incredibly annoying lag gone.
  • Press OK to save configuration



P.S. KDE 4 sucks.
P.P.S. I've switched to Gnome.