Happiness is...

... getting Amarok to play MP3's again.

Various n sundry pointerst to Kubuntu Dapper KDE installs pointed at installing libmad and using the gstreamer plugin. I ended up not going down that path, and there I found victory!

What I did was install the Arts MP3 plugin, and told Amarok to just play through Arts, and All Was Well!

libarts1-mpeglib - mpeglib plugin for aRts, supporting mp3 and mpeg audio/video

Yay!