Problem/Justification
TrueSearch (TrueNAS 26) indexes files by filename, content, and file type, which enables macOS Spotlight search over SMB. It does not, however, index embedded media metadata — ID3 tags in MP3 files, or the metadata atoms in M4A/MP4/AAC.
Large audio libraries are typically organized by embedded tags (artist, album, title, genre, year) rather than by descriptive filenames. On a Mac with directly-attached storage, Spotlight’s media importers read these tags, so a track can be found by artist or album even when the filename contains none of that text. When users migrate from a macOS file server (which provided this metadata-aware Spotlight) to TrueNAS, the capability is lost: a tag-only query — e.g. searching for an artist whose name is not in the filename — returns nothing.
This is a parity gap with Synology’s Universal Search, which indexes embedded audio metadata and exposes it through macOS Spotlight over SMB. I verified this directly: a track whose artist appears only in the embedded tag (not the filename) is found on Synology DSM, but not via TrueNAS TrueSearch.
At minimum, include the extracted tag values in the searchable text so that a Finder query for an artist or album returns tag-matching files. Ideally applied to common audio formats (MP3/ID3, M4A/AAC, FLAC, OGG), with video metadata atoms (MP4/MOV) as a possible follow-up.
Impact
This affects any Mac-centric environment serving tagged media (music, audiobooks, podcasts, video) over SMB, and it is a real adoption blocker for home and prosumer users replacing aging macOS file servers, for whom fast Finder search of a music archive is a primary daily workflow. Closing the gap would make TrueNAS directly competitive with Synology and QNAP for the very common “Mac + media archive” scenario.
It also appears architecturally aligned with the stated TrueSearch design — cataloging into a common back-end database intended for future extension. Adding a metadata-extraction stage for audio/video would be an incremental extension of the existing content-extraction pipeline (Apache Tika, already widely used for this purpose, parses ID3 and MP4 metadata).
User Story
As a Mac user with a large, well-tagged MP3/M4A library on a TrueNAS SMB share, I want to search by artist, album, or track title in Finder and find the right files even when the filename does not contain that text — so that I can locate music as quickly as I could on my old macOS file server, without renaming my archive or running a separate music-library application.
