what are the different parameters that i can search on? artist, song title, album, year, etc? any others?

You can search on those four, and Genre as well. That's all.

Regarding artist and album name, what does the empeg do when i enter that search string in? does it dynamically build a playlist with every song having the artist name in the tag that i searched for?

Good guess. That's exactly what it does. I creates a little playlist in memory. The contents of the playlist is whatever you picked in the search. If it was a search for a song title, that playlist is one song long. If it was a search for an artist, the playlist contains all songs by that artist. If it was an album search, the playlist is all songs with that album name... etc.

This little playlist isn't something you can select from the "playlists" menu, it's only temporary- it's just what starts playing when you complete the search.

There's also a feature that lets you append a search to whatever's playing right now. For example, you could start with a search on "Nine Inch Nails", then append a search for "Yanni". The Yanni songs would get tacked on after the NIN songs in this temporary playlist. You could shuffle that, and fry your brain by trying to shift moods back and forth.

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Tony Fabris