Back story: Do any of you use rhythmbox? It's supposed to be an iTunes replacement for Linux systems. I gave it a try, had it recurse my audio file directory tree and it seemed to find everything (much better than iTunes on Windows a few years ago -- it only found half of the files) and I really like the xml format it uses for the db and that it allows the user to specify the db file at startup (--rhythmdb-file option). The file location is given in the <location> field in the xml and it can be a local file (file://) or a URL. This also makes it possible to do cool stuff like translate the locations (using perl, say) from file:// to http:// so that you can access them remotely if you have a web server on the machine, or you can copy the db to another machine and edit the locations to have a different mount point. Question: Whenever I start up rhythmbox, it checks all of the files. I'm not sure of what it is checking, and it runs pretty fast per file, when the files are on a local drive, but any checking is pointless when I know the files haven't changed. It is a very serious problem when the files are located on an internet server and you have more than 50,000 files. I need to find a way to make rhythmbox stop checking, or maybe never start checking. There are a few options that seem like they would work, but they don't work so I'm hoping someone here will have an idea. None of these options do the trick: --no-update Do not update the library with file changes -n, --no-registration Do not register the shell --dry-run Don't save any data permanently (implies --no-registration) Thanks. Mike