Comment 15 for bug 149936

was running into problems like this with amarok. did 2 things:
1. as found on another post about amarok gone bad, ran
$ xine-check
this gave a few warnings. In particular, I had been trying to fix the amarok problem and had removed the libxine-dev package. bad. So I reinstalled the suggested packages until xine-check no longer griped too much.
2. I checked what groups I was in! I was only in the admin and [myusernameasagroup] groups. I added myself to the audio group
$ sudo /usr/sbin/usermod -G audio username
$ newgrp audio
$ amarok &
This worked like a charm. Note that I thought of this only b/c I've had some problems of late on my Gentoo box with upgrades to the pam packages and stuff. I am guessing that I did something similar, perhaps, on this kubuntu box.

Just a thought. Works for me.