googling around i’ve found that lot’s of forum threads suggest to use phonon xine backend to avoid amarok skips tracks
amarok can play with phonon gstreamer backend without any additional suse repository using the gstreamer “good” plugins (and good extras, but not sure that’s mandatory…) in addition to the fluendo mp3 decoder
everything is possible “within” the distribution
hope this can be useful… otherwise, hope google indexes this 
bye
PS without the good gstreamer plugins, amarok in debug mode (amarok -d 2>out.log) shows the following error:
amarok: [ERROR!] Can not parse dynamic.xml
amarok: [ERROR!] “unexpected end of file”
amarok: [ERROR!] “Line: 1, Column 1”
even if not sure… but it’s not present in a good amarok run…