I am a big fan of Amarok – as a music application I think it is the best there is (much better than iTunes).
I have for some time however had problems with it freezing up on a regular basis. It seemed to happen with no particular pattern, even if I opened the application and left it on screen without playing any music or touching the mouse or keyboard, after a few minutes it would freeze up. It generally didn’t freeze for very long – maybe 10 seconds or so, but seemed to be doing it quite regularly every few minutes.
I eventually got so fed up with it that I tried switching to Banshee, but had exactly the same issue. I then tried Rhythmbox and had the same issue yet again, so decided it had to be a common library in Ubuntu rather than the apps themselves.
I have tried various things to get to the bottom of the problem. I stumbled across quite a few posts relating to issues with ESD (Enlightenment Sound Daemon) causing problems in all sorts of applications, but switching to OSS or ALSA didn’t seem to improve matters.
So, for now I have still not found a solution – please let me know if you have any suggestions!