I spent almost an hour with Apple Support yesterday trying to solve what appears to be a bug in Finder in Lion, without getting a result.
The problem occurs when I try to use Finder to search a folder containing music. In Snow Leopard I could search by Album or Artist. In Lion, those option do not appear to work any more. I can only search by song title.
A senior tech support at Apple was not sure if this is a bug or if they have changed the functionality of Finder.
To me it’s a severe limitation of Finder in Lion.
—–
Lorne
MacMost Q&A Forum • View All Forum Questions • Ask a Question
Searching By Music in Lion
Comments: 5 Responses to “Searching By Music in Lion”
Comments Closed.
I was able to do it. Album searches work better than artist searches because "Artist" is missing from the list of things you can search for some reason.
All I did was open a new Finder window. I used the search box in the upper right to search for part of an artist's name. Lots of results came up, but under "Documents" I had all of the mp3 files in my iTunes library show up that had that artist name, even though the name would have only been found in the "artist" field in the file contents.
I could narrow the results down by pressing the + button and adding "kind" is "music." Then I only saw those mp3 files.
Same for album name. But I could also search for album name by leaving the mail search field blank (just start by pressing Command+F), choosing "kind" is "music" and then another + for a second criteria and "other." Then I chose "album" for the other, and a part of the album name "contains." Then I got a list of music that had an album name with that term.
Ah -- I figured out the artist thing too. It is "Author" not "Artist." When I did a search for "music" and "author" contains part of the name, I get the desired result.
I guess the difference is that the content that I was searching for is not in my iTunes library. Originally I was searching on an external hard disk that had been created in Windows. The Apple tech rep had me create a folder on my desktop and copy some files from the external drive to that folder. Same result. No ability to search by album or artist (or author, we tried that too.) So, MS-DOS folder search used to work in Snow Leopard but doesn't in Lion.
Just tried your method. Same result. No search results. Apple tech says he will get back to me later on today once he has verified that it used to work in Snow Leopard (it did). Search does work for content that I have in iTunes. Trouble is that I have too much content on the external drive for my Mac. I only want to move certain tracks into iTunes but now I can't search for them any more.
You failed to mention that you were searching an external disk that was formatted for Windows. That's a HUGE difference!
I have no experience with that. But it sounds like Spotlight is not indexing that drive. Maybe check your Spotlight preferences?
Sorry 'bout that. I just figured you knew :)
Yes, we did force Spotlight to index the internal and external drive using Spotlight preferences. From Spotlight preferences you click the Privacy button and add the external (or internal drive). Then you click the minus button at the bottom to remove the drive. This forces a re-indexing.