Configure Amarok to use MySQL DB

Amarok 1.2 and above support a MySQL database backend in addition to the built-in SQLite database engine.

Amarok 1.4 requires MySQL 4.0 or better, and is known to work with MySQL versions up to 5.0.22 (but, at the time of writing, not 5.0.24). Since Amarok-1.4.2 MySQL-5.0.24 also works. Amarok 1.4.5 work with MySQL 5.0.27.

Older versions of Amarok may work best with MySQL versions < 5.0. One known problem as a result of this is Amarok's DB continually growing and adding multiple entries for every track on each rescan.

If your locale is UTF-8, make sure the default character set for your mqsl daemon is set up to utf8, so that all databases and tables are created with character set utf8. In Debian:

1) Edit /etc/mysql/my.cnf, adding this line to stanzas [client] and [mysqld]:

default-character-set = utf8

2) Restart the mqsql daemon to pick up the new default charset

Do this before you create the database for amarok.

Make sure the MySQL daemon is running. If necessary, add it to your linux startup scripts, via whatever method your distro uses.

Create a root password for MySQL, if you have not already done so.

$ mysql -u root
set password for root@localhost = password('xxxxxxx');
flush privileges;
quit;

Of course change xxxxxx to the password you want.

Once you have done that, you must create a MySQL database and a user for amarok for through any usual method. You can just use the "mysql" command: (it will ask for your MySQL root password)

$ mysql -p -u root
CREATE DATABASE amarok;
USE amarok;
GRANT ALL ON amarok.* TO amarok@localhost IDENTIFIED BY 'PASSWORD_CHANGE_ME';

In the above example, a database called "amarok" and a user called "amarok" were created. This user can access the database from localhost using the password "PASSWORD_CHANGE_ME". To allow access from remote hosts, use amarokuser@'%'.

It is very important that you 'GRANT ALL' privileges to user "amarok". In particular, "amarok" needs ALTER privileges on its database.

Once a database exists, open the Configure Amarok screen (found in the Settings menu), and go to the Collection tab. Change the drop-down menu from SQLite to MySQL. You will have to specify the host ("localhost" if the database is in your local box), port (3306 is the common value), and the name of the database that you have created for it ("amarok" in our example). Additionally, the username and password of a user who has write access to the given database needs to be specified (in our example, the user is "amarok", and the password is "PASSWORD_CHANGE_ME").

So if you get errors about not being able to connect to the server or database, (_not_ password related errors) then you will have to edit my.cnf on the host machine (/etc/mysql/my.cnf, most likely), comment out the "bind_address" variable and restart MySQL. You may have to comment out "skip_networking", so that MySQL will listen on a tcp socket.