I'm glad I'm not the only one who misses this feature. To be honest, this is one of the features that I felt differentiated MJ from the other players and significantly influenced my decision to make THIS the one player worth paying for. I found it especially useful since I've taken great care to carefully organize my file structure.
I meant to mention "My Computer" in my previous post: I realize that My Computer is one way to browse by file location, but it's behavior is much different than the File Location in MJ 8. For instance:
(1) MJ 8 showed only folders that contained music in the current library, making it much easier to browse.
(2) MJ 8 made it easy to determine which drives/folders contained music in the the current library. This is especially useful when you manage half a dozen different HDs and removable media drives.
(3) In MJ 8, if I selected a folder in "File Location," all songs in that folder and in subfolders would be displayed in the file list. MJ 9's My Computer only lists files in the current folder and ignores subfolders. I would argue that this is the correct behavior for My Computer, which is why the additional "File Location" subgroup under "Media Library" needs to return.
(Still trying to imagine reasons WHY this feature was removed)
On a another note, I really like the new complete/incomplete subgroups under Album Type/Album/Name. Any chance this breakdown could be offered under the Artist/Album group as well? This would be equivalent to a Album Type/Artist/Album/Name group. In other words, I'd like the functionality of "Album Type/Album/Name" currently in MJ9, but sorted by Artist rather than by Album.
Thanks for listening!