After the last update of itunes I seem to have lost all my music (Cds that I had downloaded into itunes) except the once I had purchased from the itunes store. Can anyone help? Do you know what might have happened?

Question

After the last update of itunes I seem to have lost all the music that I had downloaded from my Cds. It was a lot of music! All I still have is the music that I had purchased in the itunes store. And before you asked. No, I did not have a backup. Never got around to do it.
Does anyone of you have an idea if and how I can maybe get my music back?
Your help is very much appreciated. Would it help if I recover my computer from an earlier date?? I am not even sure if I make sense here.

Answer 1

Hi - I seem to have a similar problem. I was prompted to update to iPhoto 11 yesterday (don't know why yesterday, I'm in iPhoto all the time). So I followed the instructions, library updated, all existing events and albums are there. I uploaded some more pictures and created a few new albums and did some new year spring cleaning, moving stuff around etc. And I started making a calendar.
I've opened it up today, my calendar is still there as are all the new events, but the pictures are empty outlines. If I open up a picture I just get the "!" but I can still see the thumbnails showing in the slider in the bottom - I don't know if that means the source files must still be there somewhere, or if it just means it captured thumbnails yesterday.
I've gone into it via "show package contents" and there just don't seem to be any masters for an upload yesterday. I also just had a look in the last import folder, because of a comment from someone above. As I scrolled down through the folder the images were there and literally disappeared in front of me - by which I mean, the thumbnails were there as I scrolled down and then would turn into empty outlines...!
All my old folders are still there, thankfully (although they're of course the ones that are also all safely back up).
Although I have a timecapsule, my photo library is too big to keep on my hard drive, so I keep it on an external drive - so it only gets backed up when I do it manually (thanks Apple for that, I will never understand why it was designed to work - or not work - that way). So if the pictures have been lost then they are gone for good which is super-frustrating (I just got back from South Korea and was in the middle of sorting out all my shots from that trip).  It seems that this can only have happened because of the update - I should have known better than to have pressed yes.
If you have any ideas, I'd be most grateful!
Regards
R