I have been evaluating Amarok for a week now and one thing really bugs me.
I don't want Amarok to mess with my folders.... just be good and scan for files.
Is it possible to add files to the collection without Amarok creating it's own folder structure?

well, yes. of course. Amarok ONLY creates its own dir structure if you explicitly go through the dialogue and tell it to do so. Default behaviour is to simply select the directory you want to be part of your collection in Amarok settings. Go to the collection page there, and turn on the folders you want to include.

OK, now I feel really dumb.

I swear I tried that before and Amarok just sat there forever saying "Building Collection". Tried it again with a smaller sample and it worked perfectly. So if I understand this correctly, only when I drag and drop into the collection area will the files be imported into the folder with the folder/file  changes as formatted within Amarok.

I suppose this also means that when I introduce new folders I must rescan the entire collection. Wouldn't that be a bit time consuming on a fairly large collection?

Thanks for pointing me in the right direction.

No need to do a full scan - if you check "watch for changes" amarok will update your collection automatically. Alternatively, on the tools menu, there are two collection scan options - one does an incremental scan, the other does a full rebuild.