Fix Duplicate Collection Entries in Amarok

While many people in this digital age prefer to buy music from iTunes (or other online stores) or, probably more commonly, pirate their music through torrents, I prefer to have the physical disc. I don't use the actual disc much; I rip the songs to my hard drive, and never see the disc again. The advantage is no DRMs on the ripped files (and the freedom to use them how I want), a physical backup should I accidentally delete the files, and, when I'm no longer interested in the music, something I can sell without worrying about a RIAA lawsuit.

With that background, I recently bought a bunch of CDs from BMG Music. When the CDs arrived, I went about doing the normal ripping process, with Amarok playing the last CD that I had ripped. After a while of "updating collection", I noticed that a few of my albums in my Collections pane had double tracks, in the form of "track 1, track 1, track 2, track2" etc. Since there were no obvious buttons in the interface to get rid of the duplicates, I turned to google and found a post on the Ubuntu forums regarding the problem. The first few posters found that deleting the ~/.kde/share/apps/amarok directory and restarting Amarok fixed the issue. Then RosenCrantz posted (and pointed to their blog article) saying that you need to delete "just the files collection.db, collection_scan.files and playlistbrowser_save.xml in case of duplicate playlists." While they mentioned duplicate playlists, it makes sense that deleting and recreating collection.db and collection_scan.files would fix the duplicate collection issue. Oh, and then ExBuM came in and said to go to Tools -> Rescan Collection. Whaddaya know, that one worked. :D