All of a sudden, a "!" has appeared in front of a lot of my iTunes songs and it says that the original cannot be found. What happened? And what do I do now?

A week ago, I was burning CDs, no problem. This week, I tried to burn a CD from the same playlist, but all of the songs now have a "!" in front of the title. When I click on it, it says that the original cannot be found. More and more of the songs are having this same "!" showing up. What happened? And how do I get the music back? There are thousands of songs with this "!"!!!!! And, I'm a music teacher, so this is my life!

The ! Means that the link is broken between what is shown in the Library and where the file is located. You will need to relink the items. You can search you HD to see where the files are located then use CMD-O to relink.
Did you move any items using the Finder?
iTunes is a data base manager and if you move items outside of the iTunes interface then iTunes might not keep track/find the move.
You might find a script here to relink the tracks with ! - http://dougscripts.com/itunes/
MJ

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Hi there hhcd92!
I have an article here for you that can help guide you through troubleshooting this situation:
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http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1808
Thanks for coming to the Apple Support Communities!
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Braden

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tt2

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asifmanzoor wrote:
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WhyItuneswhy wrote:
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All of a sudden, a "!" has appeared in front of a lot of my iTunes songs and it says that the original cannot be found. What happened? And what do I do now?

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