I've looked through all the threads here and on the Ubuntu forums. The thread posted last year about fixing the "too many errors on playlist" problem doesn't seem to help me.

To get it out of the way, I have the newest version of Ubuntu (Lucid Lynx) and have never used Amarok before.

This is the error I'm getting, but there's more. Using terminal, I can't actually find the folder where Amarok is located. I've looked for it in the file brower and it is not in usr-->shared where it should be, yet every time I use the search option to find it, that's where it is (as a hidden file, I'm assuming). When I try to open any of the Amarok-labelled folders, the browser crashes. Amarok also refuses to quit when I ask it to.

None of the forums I've checked show the actual command for moving .xine to .xine-bak (to rebuild the file directory or whatever). and since I have no way of finding where the actual file is I can't figure out how to fix this.

First of all, are you using Ubuntu with Gnome or Kubuntu with KDE? Starting with the exact Amarok and desktop version you are running would be most helpful, too.

Also, you don't exactly give the exact error message you get, and your thread does not tell what exact problem you are running into, instead you are mentioning various threads which can be about a lot of things.

So why not just tell us what exact problems you have and what error message you get?

From the title I guess you can't play mp3 files, but that is not an Amarok related problem, but you a distribution specific one, since the distributions do not ship the patented mp3 codecs by default. For Amarok with the phonon-backend-xine (standard on Kubuntu with KDE) you need to install the kubuntu-restricted-extras package.