I posted this over at ubuntuforums, and 8 bumps and 4 days later, I've received not one response, so I'm trying over here.

Is there a way to keep Amarok from automatically updating podcasts? I know you can change the scan interval, but whenever I try to set it to zero, it just resets to a half hour. I've also unticked "Automatically scan for updates" on every podcast, but it still scans for updates.

I'd rather scan on my own because Amarok chokes whenever a feed hasn't updated; it spins its wheels, spawns a bunch of searches that never end, and when I try to use it, it crashes.

So I'd rather it just let me scan manually, but there doesn't seem to be a way to actually turn off the automatic scan or the scan interval.

Ideas?

Have you tried turning off "Automatically Scan for Updates" from the top Podcasts "folder" rather than each individual podcast? Occasionally I have found that the individual settings don't always seem to apply for some reason.

Beyond that, perhaps you could just set the interval to 999999999 hours? Certainly not the most elegant solution...but it might work.

Hey, thanks for the reply -- that's the first one I've gotten.

I have my podcasts categorized into folders under the Podcasts folder in Amarok, which means you can't configure anything from the top Podcasts folder, only at the subfolder level. That's where I turned off automatic updates, but it doesn't seem to do anything.

But yeah, I have set it not to update for something like 2 days at a time (I'm at a different machine right now and can't check), but there's some point where it decides the time limit is too long, and it resets to something like every 30 minutes. I don't know where that point is, but I think 72 hours was too long.

Perhaps you could use sqlite to change the podcastchannels.autoscan field to 0 on each of the entries.

jschiwal, I like that idea. I'll give that a try.

Just checked my laptop (where the issue is occurring), and the sqlite database has autoscan set to zero on all feeds.

There was a load of updates in the past couple days. This may have been ironed out, I have no idea. But I'll keep an eye on it to see if it still chokes.

Yeah, I was just going to ask which version of Amarok are you seeing this in.