If there’s some elementary solution to this problem, I’m gonna kick myself. Please be gentle.
I really enjoy listening to trance-style music. I tend to listen to a lot of streaming audio trance stations, and every so often, I’ll buy a random trance CD in the hopes of getting a good sampler.
The problem I’ve always had is that radio stations never identify who the artist is! I suppose it’s impracticable, but I’m largely in the dark on who mixes what. I’ll occasionally stumble across something familiar on a CD, but largely, I wouldn’t know where to go shopping for a particular song I like, because I don’t know who mixed it. And how the heck would I ask someone about a tune? (Excuse me, but do you sell that song, “Thump thump woosh woosh thump thump thump?”)
Does anyone have any suggestions? I’d love to develop a trance library if I knew who the hell I was listening to.
Not much you can do about radio-radio, but many streaming internet stations will broadcast what the current song is. You might need a player that supports this for it to show up in the player itself, but often they’ll also have the current info at their web site. For instance, Digitally Imported, whose trance station I listen to occasionally myself, does this. It broadcasts the info, so I can see the current song info right in my player, iTunes. See if the stations you like listening to have a web site.
Check out Paul Oakenfold. It’s all good. 
My absolute favorite trance CD is Armin van Buuren’s Boundaries of Imagination. So beautiful…almost had me in tears one time (OK, certain psychedelic substances might have been part of the experience 
). His Transparance is really gorgeous too.
Other DJs to look for:
Tiesto (In Search of Sunrise, Vol. 3, Magik, Vol. 6)
Ferry Corsten (Global Trancemissions 2)
I lseem to love Dutch trance. Some that aren’t Dutch:
Oakenfold (Tranceport, Perfecto Presents Another World)
Christopher Lawrence
Sasha & Digweed (Northern Exposure)
Tiesto is touring the U.S. right now. See him if you have a chance.
In addition to the ones already mentioned:
Paul Van Dyke
Mauro Picotto
Pablo Gargano
Pee Wee Ferris
Vincent de Moor
John “00” Fleming
I listen mainly to psy-trance thesedays so my suggestions are mostly old-skool but still worth listening to, a lot of trance stuff is timeless anyway I think 
The trick with getting good tunes (on vinyl in my example) is to find a good artist and listen to stuff on that label Oaky = Perfecto for example each time you discover a more popular artist on a new label you’ll automatically find loads of similar stuff as well. Although my advice is not to listen to trance at all - as a lover of dance music i’m well aware of the ‘its just boom, boom, boom, it all sounds the same’ argument…but in the case of trance its actually true.
But the poster obviously likes the ‘doof doof’, so where’s the problem?
Ministry of Sound has a bunch of good trance CDs. Some of them are tough to find but many music shops have at least one or two or their compilations. They usually have a few trance albums per year, such as the Annual 2002 or Clubber’s Guide to Trance etc.
Pixelle - it isn’t the doof doof I was talking about…and theres no problem just my opinion