Ok, here's the scenario. I've got a iMac in my office with all of my mp3s on it. For the most part it is organized Artist/Album/Song.mp3

Now my wife has a Vibez that she uses at the gym. She connects to the iMac through her Macbook to which the Vibez is connected. She just drags and drops songs from the iMac to the Vibez. This is the easy part.

When it comes time to remove songs from the Vibes it gets tricky. She may want to remove all of the "George Harrison" songs. Now these songs are just spread helter skelter all over the Vibez. Some are inside other an "Album" folder, others might just be in the root directory. Spotlight can't seem to find files based on an mp3 tag. Is there anyway to find files in OSX by mp3 tag? Thanks in advance!

"Authors" seems to look at the artist field of MP3 files.

If everything is tagged properly and you still have issues with Spotlight (it's buggy), then start iTunes and hold down the OPTION key which will allow you to create a new library.

This will be a temporary library so put it wherever you want it.

Next go to iTunes prefs and tell it not to move your music - leaves it on its original drive when added to iTunes.

Now drag all the music from the Vibez into this iTunes library.

Find the songs you want in the iTunes library and when deleting them, tell it to remove them from disk as well.

Great! Thanks. I thought that iTunes might be the answer.

I suppose I should clarify my answer, as this can be done in the Finder. Browse to the root of the MP3 player, then hit Command-F to bring up the search. Under the Search: label in the upper left, you can then switch to search the folder you are looking at. Next, there should be a "Kind" option in a dropdown. Click that and pick "Other". Search for the "Authors" attribute then click ok. Next type in the desired artist to search for, and results should start filling the Finder window.

You can click Save in the upper right to save this as a smart folder for future use when done.

Unfortunately I find that Spotlight is buggy and sometimes won't even find a file when it's sitting right in the open folder - and searching by filename.

Doing this with iTunes has the added benefit of being able to easily see all the other track data in a cohesive interface to better select what will actually be deleted and what might need to be kept.

Thanks guys. I'll try out both methods. I'm guessing SWMBO will prefer the iTunes method. As long as she doesn't get too pissed that iTunes will only delete the songs.

You could always set up iTunes to copy music to a music folder (its default). Set that folder in iTunes prefs to be the root of the MP3 player.

This way that library will reflect the contents of your MP3 player and you can drag items into iTunes to put them on the player. Unfortunately this isn't the same thing as managing your full collection of music in iTunes and only dumping select songs to your player.