Darn, I was wrong!

Okay, here's my next question, then...

Are you saying that you're primarily using the search screen to select music, because you've only made just a couple of small playlists?

Just as a reminder... This player was originally designed to use nothing BUT playlists, and most of its functions are based around that. The search screen is just for one-off quick searches for something like "I wanna hear this particular tune next". Most of the time you'll find it's quicker and easier to use playlists to select things like groups of artists or multiple albums.

If your problem is that you haven't created any playlists and it looks like too much work... Then what you want is to have an artist/album tree of playlists to be "created for you". There are a couple of ways to go about it.

You can use something like MP3 Tag Studio to organize your music on your PC's hard disk into that kind of a folder tree and then drag and drop the entire tree onto the root playlist. That will make a tree of playlists for you.

Alternatively, you can use Jemplode to have it create soup-based playlists for you.