First off, last.fm doesn't seem to be keeping track of the songs I'm playing. 

I went to settings > configure amarok > internet services > last.fm settings and I typed in my login information and hit "test login", but it just stays grayed out and never seems to login. 

Any idea what's wrong?

Ok, the next problem I'm having has to do with songs being/not being grouped into albums.  I dragged a folder that contained an album into amarok and when it showed up, five of the songs were listed under the album, and the other 7 or so songs were listed as stand alone tracks.  Some of the 7 stand alone tracks also had "0:00" as runtime, not sure if that has anything to do with it. After editing the tags of the 7 stand alone tracks, and making sure they were the correct album name and everything, they still weren't grouped with the other songs in the album.  Why is this?

Lastly, I edited about 10 songs just a minute ago.  I then exited amarok on accident and when I reopened it, the song tags I just edited were gone.  Why is this? In the past I've edited tags and they've stayed the way I put them, so why then did these revert to their previously non tagged state?

Thanks, any help for any one or all of these questions is greatly appreciated.

Which version of Amarok are you using? In the 2.0.x series ( 2.0.1.1, 2.0.2 ) there is a known issue with grouping not working correctly after you have edited track details. This is fixed in the most recent version, 2.1.1.

When editing tracks, did you edit tracks that were in your collection or non collection tracks that you dragged in to Amarok? I don't know if tags are ever written to the file if the file is not in the collection.

- Nikolaj

Ok, well I guess I'll have to update my version than.  I'm using 2.0.2

As for your second point, I did drag them in, but that is because they don't show up in my collection.  I'm not sure why.  I have all of my music in the same exact folder (music) and each artist has it's own folder within "music".  As I'm browsing through the collection in order to make playlists, it turns out that a lot of my music doesn't show up in the collection.  Any idea why?  Is it something wrong with the song?

In general I would strongly recommend an upgrade to 2.1.1 as _many_ issues have been fixed, including many problems with collection scanning.

It also has a ton of new features compared to 2.0.x

- Nikolaj

Alright, sounds good enough to me.

So, I'm pretty new to ubuntu, and I'm having trouble finding out how to update to that version.  I'm currently using Ubuntu version 9.04 and apparently I have to go to the "Backports PPA" (http://www.kubuntu.org/news/amarok-2.1) to get version 2.1 of Amarok, but I'm not sure what that means or how to do it.

Sorry, could you help and give instructions on how to do this?

In your package manager, add "deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ jaunty-backports main restricted universe multiverse" (without the quotes) to the list of repositories. It might be enough to just check the box for "backports". then search for amarok and check which version it wants to install.

- Nikolaj

Alright, I think I finally got it by uninstalling amarok, adding "deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/kubuntu-ppa/backports/ubuntu jaunty main" to list of repositories and then reinstalling amarok.

Now that I have the correct version, my collection won't load >_<

Edit: All I had to do was go to tools > update collection.  lol

Now that amarok is installed you might want to remove that repo again as it will otherwise pull in all kinds of other stuff as well on your next upgrade!

- Nikolaj

Ah, thanks for that tip!

So now all of my other problems seem to be fixed, with the exception of the tracks run time showing up as 0:00, but that's not that big of a concern.

New problem however, now amarok seems to be unable to connect to the internet to retrieve lyrics or to report to last.fm .  Any tips for this?

Edit: I restarted and it seems to have fixed the problem.

Thanks for all the help =)