Click a category in the sidebar: Applications, Music, TV, Messages, and Books: These categories list files individually. How do I Clean up my Audio Storage on my Mac?Ĭhoose Apple menu > About This Mac, click Storage, then click Manage. The path to the file is shown at the bottom of the File pane next to location. In the Music app on your Mac, click Songs in the sidebar on the left.ĭo one of the following: Find out where a file is stored: Select the item, then choose Song > Info.
Change where your Music Files are Stored on Mac Storynory: Original sound files regarding audiobooks for children. Project Gutenberg Audio Books: Find audio in the form of classic books.
: Search for free audiobooks, MP3 downloads, podcasts, and more. If you just want mp3, then you can choose that search token. All of your audio files will show up in the search results. To search for them, set your Finder Search preferences to "Search current Folder," then open you home folder and type Audio into the search field. Alternatively, you can also search for files by typing in the month or date. Now, you can start searching for the specific file using the search field at the top-right corner of the window.
Drag songs or folders containing songs to the Music window to add the songs to Music again. How to Find Files on Mac Using Finder Open the Finder window by clicking on the icon in the Dock. Or search for “MP4” to find files downloaded from the iTunes Store or “MP3” to find songs encoded in MP3 format. Clicking on Dictionary opens the Dictionary app, where a thesaurus and Wikipedia view are also available using the buttons at the top.In the Finder, choose File > Find, then search for a song by title or artist. Moving your cursor over in the search result displays a definition. You can simply search for words in the names or contents of files, or perform more complex searches in specific locations and for dates, file types and other criteria. If you type a word in Spotlight, one of the results is a dictionary definition of that word. Mac Basics: Searching For Files Learn how to search for files in the Finder. Using Spotlight as a dictionary or calculator If you choose begins with as the second item, you can find files whose names begin with a particular character, like space. In the Searching 'This Mac' window that brings up, select Kind is Document, then use + to add another condition with Name as the first item. If you decide you no longer need a (typically large) DVD project file and delete it, it does not delete the movie from iMovie or Final Cut.Ī simple but efficient way to take advantage of Spotlight is to use it to launch apps. To quickly launch an app that is not on your dock, just type the first few letters in Spotlight and press the Enter key. With Finder as the active application, choose Find from the File menu.
Tangentially, if you have ever burned DVDs on your Mac, you may be able to free up significant space on your hard drive by searching for “.dvdproj” in Spotlight. For example, if you are trying to locate all the Pages files on you your computer you would type “.pages” in your Spotlight search. To search for files by file extension, type the “.” in the search. For audio and video files, you can play or preview the file right in Spotlight, by moving your cursor over the file and clicking the play button. This works for many types of files such as images, documents of all kinds, and more. When the search result is displayed, you can mouse over the file name and a preview of it will appear to the left. This also works for emails.įor example, in the search result above, the Documents section displays Evernote,_Getting_Started_925.pages because the word “article” is in the body of the document.
So, if you have a document that you’ve lost, and you aren’t sure of the title, you can search using a word that you know is in the body of the document. On a Mac, Spotlight can be used to search your hard drive for any file, folder, or email based on the search criteria being in the title or the body. This article will outline some of the benefits of using Spotlight and how to use Smart Folders, which allow you to search for a file even if you don’t know its name. Spotlight is also capable of looking up dictionary definitions, launching apps, performing calculations, previewing audio, video, documents, and other files. There are many other things Spotlight can do, and searching for files is just one of them. In OS X, Spotlight is an effective way to search your entire hard drive for a file or folder, email, or any other file.