@Lowlander, thank you for the reply. The Search review was helpful. I'd forgotten some of those formats.

I'm still seeing a problem but it is narrower in scope than I thought earlier. Putting the search term in quotes does indeed limit the search to that term. "eye" in the search field does give me "eye" and not "eyes". However, it returns "eye" from any field I have an unqualified search looking for. If I put in the qualifier, for example, title:"eye" , in that case it is returning eye, eyes , eyebrows... anything in the title field that starts with "eye". I don't think it used to do that on my old PC with the same version of MM4.

The same thing is happening with other fields. artist:"glen" gives me both Glen Campbell and Glenn Miller. I don't think it should do that, should it?

Due to your help, I did develop a workaround. If I use two search terms strategically, I can get what I need. For example...
artist:glen "glen"
returns just Glen Campbell, Delbert & Glen, etc., and not Glenn Miller (as artists).
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Update (this is for other people who may read this thread):
I've just discovered Search is treating ' and " differently. And the results are confusing.
artist:'glen' ... gives me just the Glens and not the Glenns, but it isn't giving me all of them. I get a result set of 73 files.
artist:glen "glen" ... also gives me Glen and not Glenn, but it returns 701 files (apparently correctly).

Eyeballing the difference, it appears artist:'glen' is excluding every case where Glen is the first thing in the artist field. So any track where the artist is Glen Campbell, isn't returned, but if the artist is like "Delbert & Glen" or "Bobbie Gentry; Glen Campbell", it is returned. Case doesn't matter. artist:'Glen' returns the same 73 items.

So, I don't know what is going on there and I'm not going to worry about it. I'll work to upgrade to MM2024 someday and hopefully none of these problems will be in that version. I have over 500k items in my library, which is why I depend on search so much to find what I'm looking for with precision.

MediaMonkey 5 is also an old release, the current release is MediaMonkey 2024.

You may want to check the Search setting: https://www.mediamonkey.com/wiki/WebHelp:Search/4.0 Search in MediaMonkey is not impacted by Windows.

I recently upgraded to Win 11 Pro from Win 8.1 Pro. I successfully installed MMW4 and got my entire library moved over. Unlike in Win 8.1, when I search for something specific, the results come back as if I'd added "*" to the search term.

For example, if I search for "eye" (with or without the quotes) or title:eye or title:"eye", it comes back as if I had searched for eye* or title:eye* . I'm guessing this has something to do with Windows and not MM4 since it didn't work that way on Win 8. Is there a way to search and just get the results as before? I have a very large library (>500,000 tracks, mostly mp3). This is going to make it very difficult to search for some tracks by title. For example, if I want to find all tracks with the word "hear" in the title, I also get those with "heart", "hearts", "heartache", etc. For me, that particular search returned 8697 tracks instead of maybe a couple dozen.

The problem isn't limited to title searches. For example composer:van brings up Vangelis in addition to Van McCoy, which it shouldn't. But at least there I can make use of nodes to quickly get to just Van McCoy or Van Stephenson or whoever I want. That's not an option for song titles.

(For unrelated reasons, I can't upgrade to MMW5 at this time even though I'm Gold Lifetime. But if that's the only answer, I'd like to know.)

Can anyone offer some help or insight on this?

Thanks,
Richard a/k/a username JoePublic