Kellie,
If you just have a list of songs (not the actual audio) and no programming experience, then yes, you're limited to calling song/search and parsing the results, but you can specify the "&bucket=audio_summary" parameter and get back summary information with song/search. If you also sort by descending "song_hotttnesss" and ask for just one result, that should get you close to what you want. Usually, for instance, the studio version will be hottter than the live version.
For example, substitute your API key in this query and see if that works for you.
You can also post your project on the forums here and see if there is an Echo Nest API developer that might be interested in helping you.
-David