Amarok in Ubuntu Jaunty

I used to love Amarok in earlier versions of Ubuntu. It worked great not just to play back my own recorded music but also streamed Last.Fm great.
These days, however, I tend to use VLC simply because it plays all music file types without any problems.
However, I wanted to see how the new version of Amarok (2.1.1) worked in Jaunty.In a word it's "crap". Such a huge disappointment.
Although it's very much like it used to be, once I got over the failure to play, or even recognize .wma files by installing libxine-ffmpeg, I found that it just takes ages (10 minutes) to read my 52 GB of music files. Not only this, but it seems to have to do this every time that Amarok starts up.
Then I found this blog post recommending installing Amarok 1.4 in Jaunty because the updated version is, well, crap.
Actually, for me Amarok 1.4 is worse than the later version in that is seems to take 1-2 hours to read all of my 52 GB of music. Now, admittedly all of this is on an old external HD, but I used to be able to use this with Amarok with hardly any noticeable delays.
OK, maybe I haven't configured things optimally, but the omens are not good, so I don't thoink I'll be using Amarok again in the near future.
Incidentally, this post is useful in pointing to some other useful commands for when Amarok starts getting obstreperous.
OK, now please excuse me as I've got to get back to VLC.