All my mp3s were moved to trash and iTunes still sees them!

Question

I have a rather odd situation regarding the most current version of iTunes and my mp3s. Recently, I was having trouble getting my ipod nano to be recognized by iTunes. After doing much reading on this site, I found that one of the problems had to do with some of my mp3 files being locked. (How? I have no idea). So I followed the steps recommended by others: removing the itunes.xml file and deleting the library file so iTunes would rebuild itself, and unlocking the files via work in the terminal window. It worked and I was able to resync by nano.
A few days later, I was playing some music in iTunes and I happened to notice that there a few songs missing from an album (I keep my song list in album view). I navigated to the mp3 directory (I have my mp3s on an external drive under my own file structure) went into the album folder and there were no mp3s. I looked in another folder and another and still nothing. I could see my file structure but all the songs were gone. And yet they were playing in iTunes. I did a quick search and I found that all 5650 mp3s were in the .trashes folder of the external hd. And not grouped together by artist or album. But 5650 individual mp3 files.
Later on I remembered that a few days earlier, prior to nuking the iTunes library file and having iTunes rebuild itself, I had a power outage that brought down my drive. I guess the sudden loss of power and the quick shut down scrambled things.
Is there a way, a script, or application that I can use to move each mp3 file back to its original location without my having to manually move each one by hand? I can’t just drag and drop the files into the default iTunes directory since I had them all on an external drive. (Could I drop each song into the default drive and somehow iTunes would read the mp3 tag and “magically”” create a folder for the artist and album of each file? No? I didn’t think so).
Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

I realize that doesn't have anything to do with your initial problem. I was referring to the points you were making saying itunes wouldn't allow you to drag and drop the files and recreate the file structure which it would. Anyway, I've found the easiest way to manage my itunes library is to let itunes create the initial itunes folder containing the library.xml files, as well as the actual itunes music folder. After that that entire folder can be easily moved to where ever you want still keeping your library intact. So keeping that entire folder on the external drive makes thins easier for me. The exact same library can be used from different computers as well. Once you move the folder just hold down the option key while starting itunes, and select the itunes folder where ever you moved it to.