[Imazed]

My objective is to build a music player to play my large collection of Flac files and be able to select songs by artist, contributing artists, composer, conductor etc..
A few years ago I downloaded XBMC and tried it on my laptop - so slow it was unusable.
A few months later I tried the Raspberry Pi version and had a similar result.
I have just downloaded Version 13.2 “Gotham” and installed it on my Lenovo G580 laptop running Windows 8, it does run and plays my Flac files. So far so good.
Now either I am very dumb, or XBMC is intended for something else but I cannot see the point.
Yes, it does play my files but I can see no way to search for genres, play random selections, search any of the embedded tags etc. So far as I can tell there is nothing here which I cannot achieve with file explorer and any media player.
I see so many reviews suggesting that XBMC is the best media player that I feel I am missing something - can someone tell me what? Before I just give up completely.
If I am just being dumb, then perhaps someone will point me to instructions to use this program to its full extent.
Thanks