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