Shell Programming and Scripting

I am trying to write a script that will ssh into a remote machine and recurse through a specified directory, find mp3 files which may be two or three directories deep (think iTunes: music/artist/album/song.mp3), and scp them back to the machine running the script. The script should also maintain the same directory structure when copying the files.

The question is, how can I run multiple commands and custom functions over ssh? I have a function 'recurse' that I want to run remotely however I am at a loss for how to do it. I thought of creating the script on the remote machine and running it through ssh, however the remote is a Mac and I don't know much about shell scripting on a Mac.

Is this even possible to do with a BASH script? Should I be using PERL or something a little more powerful? Thanks, any help is much appreciated.

What's wrong with scp -r? Or set up rsync between the two machines. This is assuming you want the whole structure, not specific individual files.

I've thought about rsync, which would work for the file transfer, but I left out two important steps when describing the script in my first post.

1) the script must update an m3u playlist on the remote machine to point to the file once it has been moved
2) the file should be deleted once the script is run

for step one, I need to be able to create a variable containing the file path that I can write to the m3u, thus I don't think rsync will completely fill my needs here.

I'd approach this in two steps; run rsync, and then when you know the result, ssh back to the remote machine and run a script which deletes the files (unless you already did that with an rsync option) and update the playlist file.