There might be CPU activity going on when you issue those queries.
I always have taskmgr or proc explorer minimised in the tray so i can see if the CPU is busy before issuing a query.
MC can be busy for a few reasons.
- Doing library saves, this kicks off when changes are made, not immediately but shortly after. This is usually a quick affair.
- thumbnails being built in the background. You can force all thumbnails to be rebuilt with Tree&View->Thumbnails..build missing thumbnails. Be advised that with 370k files, this will prolly take several hours if not a day to complete depending on how fast your pc is.
Do you notice album thumbs taking time to display in the schemes or do they appear immediately. If its the later, then your thumbs are already built.
- Auto-import is on
Library & Folders->Auto-import folders->Options->Run auto-import in the background (uncheck)
I try to avoid pushing the "audio" button in the upper left corner of the program because the program will often take 30 seconds to 2 minutes to respond with my entire library.
I usually use the small arrow to the right of the Audio button to expand or collapse views contained therein.
random strings like "danny elfman" or "john will"
Its much faster if you tell MC what you want, in this case will assume its the artist
So if you use a keyword in the search box ar="elfman]
MC will look for only artists that end with elfman
Typing "danny elfman" or "john will" will look for all fields in all files that are searchable and only then get you results. Ok if you are not sure what those names are but much slower otherwise.
See the help file under Smartlist and search - Rules & modifiers for more info for different keywords that can be used.
A Ctrl+E gets you to the searchbox from anywhere.
A quick way to get to the default audio scheme is to click on any file in Playing now and right click Locate->Album, then do the ctrl+E and then issue a search.
Alternatively if you use tabs, just click on a tab and do your search from there.
Yet another way is to use vertical split views so your library is always avaialable next to Playing Now.
Perhaps unrelated, I often note that when modifying tags sometimes the program will not respond for a few seconds after changing a tag. Let's say for example I'm modifying the tags for 10 albums in a row listed together from within recently imported. After every 3 albums or so, the program won't respond for a few seconds. Whereas sometimes it lets me select the new album without a pause.
This is because MC has noted the tag changes made and is trying to save the changed tags back to the files, which i think in your case are on external drives. Now the first time you save the tags it can take time as the file might need to be rewritten after which there is extra filler in the tags to make future updates quicker. This all goes on in the background so you don't have to wait.