Finder Search will NOT show actual FILENAME of MP3 files....

The Apple support site talks about this a lot, always saying to 'submit feedback to Apple' which I've done for years now to deaf ears... but is there any aftermarket fix for this yet? I literally can't find my files...

If you're not familiar: when you do a search in Finder for 'filename' the results it gives back are supposed to be actual filenames - that makes logical sense. But in Apple's infinite wisdom this is NOT the case if they are MP3 files. It does NOT show you the filename, but instead shows ONLY the one single MP3 Tag field where it found that search term. This makes it a real pain to find the actual file you want.

In my screenshot example I search for "Call me". I have 6x different songs called that, by 6x DIFFERENT artists. The search results do NOT let me see which is which. There is NO way to have it show the actual filenames (which my files are named Artist + Album + Song Name = SUPER easy to tell which is which). The ONLY way to tell which is which is by Right Clicking > Get Info for ALL SIX files (or doing something more drastic like copying them all to another folder then manually browsing to that folder to see the filenames).

Any fix for this? Any stupid option I've missed which will let me search like I search for every other filetype known to man where it'll show the actual filenames?

Posted on Oct 13, 2022 6:16 AM

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Posted on Oct 13, 2022 6:26 AM

Devon Technologies EasyFind. Totally independent of Spotlight it will search for just files by file name, and sort by date.


The problem with Spotlight, is that it searches for file content and that's why you get those erroneous results.

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Oct 13, 2022 7:54 AM in response to maicon144

You need to understand how Spotlight reserve words can narrow your search results:


For instance:



or



These examples, when applied to your specific MP3 artist and title should find what you want, assuming that you have Music category selected in your Spotlight search results categories. The following will find only the remastered version of Blondie's Call Me MP3.


kind:mp3 title:"Call me" author:blondie name:remaster


With the result highlighted, you can press the ⌘ key to see the file location, and ⌘+R will open a Finder window with the file selected.

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Finder Search will NOT show actual FILENAME of MP3 files....

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