I'm trying to figure out how to do this, ideally in a way that Just Works in the best, most automated way possible.

I'm trying to set up my laptop with Amarok (1.4.4, on Kubuntu Edgy) to talk to an SMB share with a bunch of music on it.  The problem is that since I move this laptop between work and home, that share is not always available.  I don't really want to mount the share since that will cause problems if I suspend the laptop and move it elsewhere - off the network or somewhere else where the share's not available.  I'd have to remember to mount the share when I'm at work, and the system will complain bitterly if I set it up to automount the share, and it's not there when I boot.

I noticed that using Konqueror, you can just browse Windows shares and deal with files on them without actually mounting them - Konqueror just dynamically connects to them on demand.  Can Amarok do that?  I'd like to have the music show up in Amarok when the share's available, but as far as I can tell, the only way to do that is to mount the share, which as I mentioned, causes problems.

What's the most laptop-friendly way to do this?

You can use "Files" Browser to type url like smb:/ (copy the one from konqueror) to browse and listen to music. It won't show up in Collection Browser though.

How about automatically umounting the SMB share when you call for suspend?
Amarok can handle shares that appear and disappear from time to time.

It seems the Konqueror smb:// mount works transparently between network connects even for Amarok. I have my music files on smb share and when accessed it from Konqueror the first time, it mounted it on /media/music (visible as network mount icon). I then built the collection by pointing it to /media/music the first time. Many shutdowns and reboots later, even if I don't see the entry when I give the mount command, Amarok is able to play whenever i access the file from the collection. And on top of that even when it is playing a song being accessed from the network, the mount command does not show it being mounted.
So in short, Amarok seems to be able to access network file on demand.

But note, Amarok can't play directly from smb://. You have to mount the share first.

My smb share IS mounted, and yet it does not appear in "Collections."

any ideas?

Make sure you have write access to the windows share.  I had a windows share mounted with 'mount -t cifs' and was able to add it to playlists and access it, but it would fail when adding it to the collection if the user account I was using didn't have write access.

my problem isn't anything with permissions, its that I Amarok can't see any of my shares.  I don't know how to tell Amarok to navigate to a non-local drive.