What's going on?

I'm able to find Amarok in my repository but after installing it I find out that it simply doesn't work

It does appear to work at first (opens flash screen opens then the player interface appears) but then when I click on any media whether it's mp3 in my computer or a stream on the web it crashes.

I know this problem didn't start yesterday cuz I used to have Amarok a while ago (2009) but subsequently at one point Amarok stopped working "out of the box" on Ubuntu I assumed that there was some temporary issue that will be dealt with so moved on (without resorting to gimmicks and tricks to make it work) and resorted to other media players for months. But lo and behold now we're in 2011, approaching 2012 and it's still not working!

what's up? What's going on? Why is Amarok still not working "out of the box" on the CURRENTLY LATEST*** version of Ubuntu?

*** Already for more than a year Ubuntu 10.04 a.k.a. Lucid Lynx is very latest LONG TERM (LTS) release of Ubuntu.

Firstly, we're not responsible for packaging on distros. Ubuntu LTS is designed as a stable server release, and thus ships very old, un-updated packages. Again, there's nothing we can do about this. However, I know a lot of people do use Amarok on Lucid, so I doubt this is a distro-wide issue.

My first suspicion given it crashes when you try and play things is Phonon issues. What Phonon backend are you using? (settings > configure Amarok > playback > configure Phonon > backend) This should be Xine on your version of Ubuntu. Try installing kubuntu-restricted-extras, though lack of codecs ought not to crash it. Unfortunately, I don't believe there's an easy way of updating Phonon or getting better backends on 10.04.

Other things to try include a) remove Amarok's config (~/.kde/share/apps/amarok and ~/.kde/share/config/amarok*) and b) updating Amarok from the Ubuntu Backports repository (see documentation here for only installing certain packages from backports, etc) which has a somewhat more recent version available.

OK thanks for the head up, Sentynel

I'll try some of those options and see goes down.

Just for precision: the configuration files are in $HOME/.kde/share/config/. If you remove the folder $HOME/.kde/share/apps/amarok/ you will loose all your database and ratings and statistics as well as podcast subscriptions etc.