why can't i drag and drop playlist items to the file browser? i believe this would be a natural way to copy / move / link audio files to any location, incl. hard disk directories, usb devices, and, possibly, optical discs [through a burn files dialog]. or is there a better way?

anyone?

Basically the browsers are only meant as media sources, not destinations.

thank you, Mark, for the comment in particular, and for Amarok in general. music makes up the bulk of my everyday computer activities, and Amarok is my favorite music player in Kubuntu.
your answer is fairly clear, but i hope your position here is not canonized and is subject to alterations the thing is: what is there behind your decision to use the embedded browser solely as a media source to populate the playlist? is it because it's hard to implement reverse drag-and-drop operations for the browser? i don't think so ... maybe it's because such functionality is redundant? actually, that's not quite true, and i'd be glad to share with you some of my thoughts about it ... or is there something else? can you please make yourself clear? thank you.

Uhm.. I guess a bit all of the above. We've never discussed it much.

okay, i see. perhaps it's a good time to discuss it.
what i'm actually talking about is turning Amarok into a full-fledged music manager/organizer/whatever. at the moment it's pretty functional at representing, picking and playing audio from the collection, and almost primitive at manipulating the audio files themselves. but do we really need to manipulate them?
the answer is, of course, yes, because that's what we all do from time to time by means of either our stand-alone file browsers/managers or other kinds of applications that allow us to do it. question is: what application is best suited to this purpose? and in this respect i think it is Amarok who should do the job, and that's why:
correct me if i'm wrong, but most users have their audio files organized in a tree-like hierarchy quite similar to what they have in Amarok's collection [for example, artists at the top level, then albums, and songs at the bottom]. i hope you agree that Amarok offers more facilities to configure the hierarchy based on audio metadata than folders and filenames in our present file systems. therefore, we can stop maintaining our folders-and-files hierarchies in favor of using our Amarok collections. so, we can dump all the music into a single folder, and this won't affect functionality of the collection in Amarok.
but, again, sometimes we need to copy or move a number of files to, say, a usb stick. with many thousands of audio files in one folder this task gets very difficult to solve with our stand-alone file managers, especially if the filenames no longer reflect the files content. however, if Amarok could copy and/or move files, then this would be as simple as with the folders-and-files hierarchy, or even simpler.
in fact, we could benefit from this new functionality without the single-folder storage. suppose, you'd like to copy only the music of a certain genre to the stick. this could be easily done in Amarok. just change the grouping in your collection to "genre / artist" ... and voilà! all the genres at your service. now drag and drop them to the playlist and then to the file browser [a size meter of the selected or all playlist items in the status bar would be handy ]. i wonder how we can play such tricks in the present situation?
so, this is in broad terms what's on my mind. hopefully, somebody will point out other benefits of the facility, which is already widely used in file managers, but could multiply its power when applied to metadata.

Yea there's no reason that we can't drag from the playlist to the file browser outside of "it hasn't been done."

The use case you cite is already handled somewhat, you can add a generic usb mass storage device with the media manager and drag stuff to it.

oh well, thank you, Ian, for your hint. i don't understand though why not use the file manager for all locations, incl. usb devices, and remove the media manager to unify the approach.

Err not all media devices can be used from a file browser.

what are they?

basically any media device that has an internal database, and needs extra libs to transfer tracks.

since i'm not one of those fortunate possessors of such devices i might be not aware of some important details. what's there in the media manager that can't be reimplemented in the file manager? excuse me if i talk nonsense

Plenty of media devices don't have a file hierarchy.

does that mean they use a single-folder approach? if yes, this seems to sound very much like what i said earlier [see reply #5], e.i. we actually don't need to use file hierarchy. if no, Amarok still manages to transfer files to the devices in the media manager, and i can't understand why it can't be done in the file browser.

these devices require entries to be placed in their internal database so that they can be actually played by the device. There's a little more involved than a simple 'cp'.
Are you aware that you can drag track *from* amarok to various other kde applications?