Amarok should store metadata with/in music

Talking to upstream authors reveals that this is intended behavior since there is no standard way of writing these tags.
Please backup your database regularly. The database is in ~/.kde/share/apps/amarok if you are using the standard sqlite database.

Reopening, because I don't believe the previous is valid. Amarok writes its own id-3 tags for many things, and so it's perfectly fine for it to make up it's own tags for this metadata. Saying that a user should back up configuration files (under .kde) is all well and good, but the developers should err on the side of being helpful (at the least offering a "backup database" that's menu accessible). Furthermore, when you have multiple computers and want to share the mp3s (and metadata databases) across them, it currently is not practical.

It is not perfectly fine to make up its own tags. And the upstream authors refuse to do so.
So as long as there is no standard way of doing so they will not do that. (Just to let you know I am part of Amarok upstream)

For sharing a database across computers you can use another database (mysql, postgres) or use Ampache and daap.
Support for both will be improved with Amarok 2.

As I don´t want to make this a bug war please close it yourself.

Are you writing a programming language or a music player? The player should not require technical expertise to do cool & useful things with it.

You can't assume that your users' computers will be networked (am I supposed to leave my desktop computer on, and the database exposed to the internet, while I'm travelling with my laptop?), and you can't assume that they'll want to worry about what backend database they're using. Further, if they backup their music, it's a perfectly reasonable feature to backup the metadata with the music (and, fine, this can be optional if you really don't want it to be default behaviour). See digikam for a good model; it puts its database next to the photos you are managing. I don't know if it stores any metadata inside the photos or not, but when you backup your photos folder, you've also backed up the database.

There are plenty of corresponding fields to your metadata in the id3 spec, but for the missing ones consider extension fields such as id3v2.4.0 spec, field 4.2.6. You could easily condense the basic user-set information into a string, and read it back later.

If you don't want to be helpful, fine, go ahead and close the bug. But please don't mark it as invalid. The database being "hidden" so that it's not readily backupable alongside music, and being non-portable, are both constraints to the usefulness of the program.

This is not about me being unhelpful. I am just trying to tell you what Amarok developers think about this.

So to address your travel problem: When you take all of your music files with you I don´t think it is too hard to also take the database file with you.

About the database being hidden: This is the standard way of doing it for KDE apps. Just backup your .kde (or soon .kde 4 folder in Kubuntu) and you got all your settings.

About digicam: I doubt digicam does operations on its database that are as complicated and "heavy" as those for Amarok. So saving this in the folder of every album for example is not an option.

"There are plenty of corresponding fields to your metadata in the id3 spec..." <- the point here being plenty. There is no good way of doing this in a way that is transparent to other applications as well. And doing something that only works for Amarok is not very open source. It would be lock in.

I hope this helps you understand the reasoning behind this better.

Hi Reuben
I'm closing this report since upstream refuse to implement this feature, you can always ask again upstream and see how it goes. Thanks again for taking the time to report this issue and try to help to make Ubuntu better, feel free to report any future issues you might encounter.

Thanks