amarok 2 seems to play my audio files, however it plays them "silently". there is a thread in official ubuntu forum: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=550439
the problem described there looks same as mine. but the solution suggested in second post does not work for me. i am using ubuntu 8.10 and sure i have installed the package libxine1-ffmpeg.
by the way rhytmbox and other multimedia players are working right.

Almost always it turns out that the user has made a mistake. Please double check that you are actually using the xine Phonon backend, and that you have MP3 support installed.

It's basically technically impossible that Amarok wouldn't work if you did this correctly. You could additionally try other KDE 4 applications that use Phonon (e.g JuK and Dragon Player) and see if they produce sound.

I'm having the exact same symptoms with Amarok 2 in the latest Kubuntu 9.04 beta.

I installed the amarok-nightly package, and that version can play fine - but the "real" amarok package doesn't produce any sound whatsoever.

All other apps on my system, even games under Wine, play sound fine.

Sorry, but Kubuntu 9.04 isn't even in beta state yet! It's still alpha.

So you can't really expect an alpha version of the distro to work perfectly...

Yes, I know... it goes alpha 3 tomorrow I think.  I just misspoke when I typed beta.

The thing is, it *does* work perfectly.  With the singular exception of Amarok, that is.

It looks like others (http://kubuntuforums.net/forums/index.php?topic=3100214) are seeing the same issue, even in version 8.10.  I'll /bug it against Kubuntu when I get a chance

Looks like I figured out how to fix it:  Even though I had the Xine backend at the highest preference in system settings, the gstreamer backend seemed to be confusing Amarok2.

I removed the phonon-backend-gstreamer package.  For good measure, I re-installed the phonon-backend-xine package, though I'm not sure that was necessary.  I rebooted as a lazy way to restart all related services, and now it works.