I'm glad you got this issue resolved :) . I was interested in it myself; just out of curiosity.

.....and there's nothing wrong with being passionate and/or venting one's frustrations, as long as we don't get ridiculous
or go overboard (personal attacks). I didn't find anything like that in this post or your other one in Wishlist. There is nothing
wrong with being wrong out of frustration. Of course, I'm also not that sensitive.

I'm posting again here to correct my misunderstanding. I now know that, in order to get Search to do what I want, I need to check the Search Whole Words Only box in Options > Search. Then, If I search on [u]title:arm[/u] , I'll just get songs with the word "arm" in the title. If I search instead for [u]title:arm*[/u] , I'll get "arm", "arms", "army", etc. So it's a little different than before in that you don't use the quote marks to do the more restrictive search. I mistakenly made a big to do about nothing. My apologies. The only thing I'll say in my defense is that in the first post I did ask if I was missing something. Now I know I was.

I agree that it would be great to have the correct reduction performed.

I do not have "Search Whole Words Only" selected.

What I meant by "but, really?" was, do users really have to use this kind of workaround to compensate for something like [u]title:"arm"[/u] not working as it used to (and should still)?

Sometimes I [u]want[/u] the partial word search. If I want songs with just the word "try", I expect my search to be [u]title:"try"[/u] . If I want variations (try, tryin', trying), I would use the search [u]title:try[/u] . Why was this distinction taken away in MM4? I'm thinking this is a bug and this thread should be moved to the "bugs" section.

I'd expect that unless you have Search whole words only selected under Tools > Options > Search.

Add on to my earlier post: I realized another workaround would be to put this in the search box: [u]"arm" AND title:arm[/u] (to give me songs containing the word "arm")

...but, really???

This answer may be in the forum somewhere, but I can't find it. A search on "search" returns a lot of threads.

I'm a recent convert from MM3 to MM4. In MM3, if I did a search on [u]title:"arm"[/u], the results would return all songs with "arm" in the title, but not songs with "arms", "army", "Armenia", etc. If I wanted all of those, [u]title:arm[/u] (no quotes) would have done the trick.

In MM4, [u]title:"arm"[/u] acts just like [u]title:arm[/u]. I get "arms", "army", etc., both ways. What gives? Surely they didn't take away the ability to specify an exact match by field (e.g., title:"arm").

And yes, I know I could change the drop-down list of fields to search the Title field only and then just search for "arm". That would be a REAL inconvenience. I have 180,000-plus tracks in my library. I search A LOT and search on different fields at different times. And yes, I know I can just search for "arm" without specifying a field and only get "arm" in any of my group of search fields. However, if I want to search for a song containing the word "brothers", I don't want to wade through all the artists that have "brothers" in their name. I want the functionality that was there before.

Am I missing something?