Controlling Finder with the Keyboard

[Knacker]

I'm trying to select a few things out of a folder to put them on a flash mp3 player. On windows XP, it was extremely easy; I could just hold down control and arrow through the list of items, and press space on each thing I wanted to select or deselect. I could hold shift and move the cursor, and everything between where I started and where they cursor was would be selected.

 

Finder's selection process is simply frustrating to me by comparison. When you want to select a range of things by holding shift, it would seem logical that if you go too far, you could hit back in the opposite direction and whatever you selected last would be deselected. This isn't the case; it simple takes whatever is just above the selection, and adds it, without deselecting what you originally selected. In addition, there seems to be no way using the keyboard to select noncontiguous items using the keyboard.

 

Am I simply missing something? What's wrong with the finder's keyboard interface? Is there some alternative software which works better?

 

Also, most frustrating of all, is that when you get what you want selected in list view, clicking on the highlighted line to try to drag it somewhere DESELECTES everything you've selected so far.