Finder can't search external hard drive on MacBook Pro

Hi. I am running a MacBook pro late 2013 with Big Sur. I use my MacBook with an external hard drive that has hundreds of thousands of songs on it that I use for radio. Finder has never been great at finding every song. For example if i use finder and type in a word like "fire" it might show me Ring of Fire by Johnny Cash, but it won't show me "Light My Fire" by Jimmy Hendrix. It seems totally random as to what songs it will leave out of the search. It seems some songs are simply invisible to it. My wife finds she has the same problem and has recently gone back to PC because she was sick of not being able to find files and folders. Recently its gotten worse. Finder now will not search any of my hard drives. It shows them in the left sidebar. I can manually search through them by clicking on every folder separately, but i can no longer search for key words. I've looked in "spotlight" and "privacy" as a lot of online comments suggest and even moved the hard drives in and out of the "Don't search these" list. Nothing changed. I used "command" and "F" once i had the hard drives open in finder, but it still only shows what's on my actual MacBook. I really need to be able to search these hard drives using keyword searches for my work. I tried the external hard drives on a friend's computer and they still work. Please help!?

[Re-Titled by Moderator]

Original Title: Finder can't search external hard drive