I'm not too fond of the Rhythmbox player and I've grown to really like Amarok. However, it seems to freeze up somewhat frequently whenever I open it (I'm going to guess maybe once every 3 or 4 times it opens, but it's fairly inconsistent).

Here's what happens when it freezes: I click the icon and the splash screen comes up as if it's loading, but it hangs there. The Amarok icon never appears in my system tray (sorry, using the Windows term because I don't know the Ubuntu term for it).

Then I try to restart the computer by hitting the "Log off" icon, which, in turn, freezes up both toolbars. Then I have to hit Ctrl+Alt+F1 and type in "sudo shutdown -r now" to restart the computer. And sometimes that doesn't work-- It'll hang and I have to hold down the power button on my computer to force the power off. Sometimes "shutdown -r now" works, though.

The thing is, I have absolutely no idea what prompts Amarok to freeze at startup and what prompts it to start fine. What I do know, though, is that this is what comes up in the terminal when it does freeze:

But here's another eccentricity: Whenever it freezes in a terminal, I have no problem just closing the terminal and starting up Amarok again (and it'll work). It's only when I start it by clicking on the icon that I have to restart the computer.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. It's more of an annoyance than anything, but it sure is a big annoyance.

I can't explain the frequent crashing, but the reason Amarok won't start up again after that might be that its process is actually still running in the background. If Amarok has crashed, open a terminal and type 'ps -e | grep amarok', and then kill all those processes, before starting Amarok again.

Oh, wow, that looks like it's going to be a particularly useful command for all kinds of things. Thanks!