First of all, I really like amarok, great work. I thought iTunes was the best but I\'ve changed my mind as soon as I came into amarok.

Then, I have a problem, amaroK refuses to play \"some\" of mine mp3s. I\'m using v. 1.2.3 with aRts engine.

They are all valid mp3s anyway, I can play the regularly with mpg123, but it says \"Garbage at the beginning of file\"

Then amarok seems to take forever to release the default audio device, so that I have to wait 5min everytime I close it to open another audio-enabled app or it will complain...

Hope it helps.
Cheers,
Joseph

Setup dmix (instructions on wiki) and use a better sound engine, for instance gstreamer or xine-lib.