Unfortunately there’s no ‘fix’ for the described behavior that I’m aware of.
However, there are a lot of free/paid utilities that will not only do what you need, but also improve the experience overall.
I could list you a dozen utilities but instead I will let you do your homework and decide what’s best for you. This list contains an important amount of utilities for iTunes controlling.
I can tell you which ones I use and my experience with them.
1) Coversutra: It’s a very well designed paid application. You can check their website for a more comprehensive summary (and a trial). The developer (Sophia) reads the suggestions and bug reports.
Pros: It’s very good for searching, very good. Think of a spotlight music dedicated. You can easily switch between playlists, songs, artists, etc. All from the menubar. (I activate it with shift + cmd + space. It also has a controller where you can define your keys for showing album art, define song rating, next, prev, pause, etc. The typical controller stuff. You will rarely need the keyboard.
Cons: Although it has been optimized several times and results come extremely fast, scrolling the results is not as fast as one would expect. Sometimes certain actions might need a “click”.
All in all, it’s a product that works fantastically for me.
2) Launchbar: I use Launchbar for everything, and sometimes for music too. Since it has iTunes support, you can easily type the name of a song/artist/list and will happily play it. What it does is create a playlist called Launchbar and whenever you make a selection, it adds the relevant songs to that list, therefore when you pause/play, things work normally. You can also do the same things (pause, play, next) from launchbar.
Pros: It’s also very fast and it does a lot of things (can’t live without it!)
Cons: Might be overkill for a song launcher/iTunes controller only.
I had the same problem (with a similar number of songs -10742) after clearing the search box. What worked for me was clicking the curved arrow button on the right hand side of the little box, at the top of the iTunes screen, that shows the currently playing song, and its progress. This button returns the screen to the library location of the currently playing song. I'm currently running iTunes 10.5.3 on a 64-bit MacBook Pro. Hope this helps.
Best Answer
I believe it has to do with the way you last accessed your iPod. If you open your iPod and select songs and then select a song to play, the next time you search for a song, it will continue to play through all of your songs. If the last time you accessed the iPod by going to a particular album or playlist, it will only play the songs located in the same album or playlist as the song you searched for.
Its a little confusing but I could try to explain it better if you need me to.