Dragging the playpos can be aborted with a right click. This is possible with a mouse and should be possible with most trackpads. Does that help?
However, with touch screens it's tricky --> I added the touchscreen tag so we can track this

FYI aborting the drag when the cursor leaves the overview has been dismissed to allow dragging the play pos left outside the overview to be sure to be exactly at 0:00. Same for the end.
We could however limit the outside area, ie. every drag move more than let's say 50 pixels away from the overview cancels the drag. This would help fix issue for touch screens.

FWIW listening to certain keypresses while dragging would be handy (eg. Esc cancels any drag move, not sure if this is the default on all supported OS) is also not possible right away as the overview doesn't keyboard focus. We might signal the overview from the keypress handler, but that's ... not easy I think.

Anyhow, I just noticed the info on dragging is missing in the overview tooltip. I'll add it.

FYI aborting the drag when the cursor leaves the overview has been dismissed to allow dragging the play pos left outside the overview to be sure to be exactly at 0:00. Same for the end.
We could however limit the outside area, ie. every drag move more than let's say 50 pixels away from the overview cancels the drag. This would help fix issue for touch screens.

Alternatively, this would also work:
Assuming the overview waveform is displayed horizontally, dragging past it horizontally would not cancel (instead seek to the beginning/end as it currently does). While dragging (significantly) outside the widget vertically aborts the seek. Maybe add some margin there so people can drag outside the widget so their finger doesn't obscure the waveform.

For a POC I went with a simple margin:

• drag outside (> 50px) shows a warning cursor and disables the time ruler and restores regular play pos painting
• releasing outside simply resets the waveform.

Check #13741

Assuming the overview waveform is displayed horizontally, dragging past it horizontally would not cancel (instead seek to the beginning/end as it currently does).

This wouldn't help with the "track clone" use case, but I think that's an "edge" case anyway ; )