This has just started recently.

Sound quality is poor.  Amarok momentarily freezes (with music continuing to play).  Every other song is quiet with poor quality, the interface freezes for about 15-30 seconds during which the song is quiet and muddled.  when control of the interface returns, the currently playing song regains volume and clarity, plays for about 5 seconds and then advances to the next song which plays OK.  The song after that exibits the same problems.

I tried purging and reinstalling amarok and amarok-xine, but this had no effect.

amarok 1.4.9.1 (April 18, 2008)
KDE 3.5.9

I am not noticing this behavior with amarok-nightly if that helps at all.