After installing the latest itunes update most of my music cannot be located. A box pops up and says the song cannot be found. What can I do?

Question

I installed the latest itunes update and now I can't play most of my songs. A box pops up that says it cannot be located and asks me if I want to locate it and when I click on Yes it gives me all my files on the computer (dropdown box) and I don't know how to find them. Some of my songs will still play.

Answer 1

turingtest2 wrote:
The "missing file" thing happens if the file is no longer where iTunes expects to find it. Possible causes are that you or some third party tool has moved, renamed or deleted the file, or that the drive it lives on has had a change of drive letter. It is also possible that iTunes has changed from expecting the files to be in the pre-iTunes 9 layout to post-iTunes 9 layout, or vice-versa, and so is looking in slightly the wrong place.
Select a track with an exclamation mark, use Ctrl-I to get info, then say no when asked to locate the track. Look on the summary tab for the location that iTunes thinks the file should be. Now take a look around your hard drive(s). Hopefully you can locate the track in question. If a section of your library has simply been moved, or a drive letter has changed, it should be possible to reverse the actions. I can provide a step by step guide if you give me the two paths.
In some cases iTunes may be able to repair itself if you go through the same steps and locate the lost track. It may then offer to attempt to automatically fix other broken links. Alternatively, as long as you can find a location holding the missing files, then you should be able to use my FindTracks script to reconnect them to iTunes.
tt2
Having the same issue.. All of playlists were deleted as well as the majority of my music can't be located. It seems the only music that can be located is the music I have purchased directly through itunes/iphone.
The location where itunes thinks my music file is:
"file://localhost/C:/Users/MY NAME/Music/iTunes/iTunes Media/"
The actual location where my music file is:
"C:/Users/MY NAME/My Music/iTunes/iTunes Music/"
This is weird because I have not moved my music and it was working fine before I upgraded to the new iTunes...
My steps:
1) update itunes to latest version
2) plug in old phone take backup in itunes
3) plug in new phone and restore from that backup
I didn't notice the issue until I looked on my phone and all of music was missing from my phone along with playlists (minus the music I purchased directly from iphone/itunes.
Then I looked in itunes in my music library and saw itunes can't locate my music files.  I also tried replacing the previous itunes library file as noted in the support link above but didn't do anything..
Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks,