Ever since I upgraded my Ubuntu desktop from 9.04 to 10.4, I have been having problems with Amarok dropping sound randomly. For example, if Amarok is playing the music and another program requires to use sound, Amarok will become silence.
One solution to restore sound in Amarok is to kill pulseaudio and restart Amarok. It works, but very annoying.
Fortunately, installing libxine1-gnome and configure Amarok to use Esound (ESD) instead of PulseAudio fixed the problem.
Thanks to this bug report https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/amarok/+bug/176332