All of a sudden itunes can't find music

There are tons of threads on this but I've seen none that answer my question. Long ago I moved my music to an external drive and set itunes to look for my misic there. It immediately worked. Today it cannot locate my music. I checked to see if the default location had moved back to my hard drive as it can do when you don't plug in the external drive first (Edit-Preferences-Advanced) and the location is correct (my external drive). I reset it again to the external drive to make sure. But I have figured out that even though I have itunes set to look for my music on the external, it has started looking for it on my hard drive. I know this because just to see what would happen I deleted the empty itunes folder from my hard drive. Now none of my music library shows up on itunes, (there was exactly one folder with 12 files on my hard drive which I had backed up previously and never erased, so I got rid of it) and all of my playlists are gone. But I can still locate each file on my external drive and play them. Do I have to reset all files individually now? And does anyone have any idea what caused this? The only thing I can think of is that I downloaded the latest update. I want to prevent this from happening again. But as far as I can tell I have done it right. I have never had this problem before, and I have no explanation as to why zero files show up on itunes when they have been set for months to an external drive.

Do you still have your library files -- more importantly do you still have a folder called Previous Libraries inside your iTunes folder?
You can always drag and drop the top level folder with your music to get it back into iTunes and import the old iTunes Library.xml file to get the playlists. The best way to make sure you don't lose your music and playlists is to back them up. There's a back up to disc command in the iTunes File menu.
I wonder if something went wrong with the library file when it upgraded from 7.3.2 to 7.4, that required a library upgrade that iTunes would have done the first time iTunes 7.4 opened.

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Itunes can't find music library on computer

Somehow I've moved my music on my computer and itunes cannot find any of it. I can't play anything on the computer, an exclamation point is next to it and the computer tells me itunes cannot find the music. Help! What did I do and how do I fix this? Where should my library be saved? It's currently under itunes folder in my music... is there somewhere else it should be?

I have the exact same problem and came here looking for an answer. Does anyone have one?!? I am so frustrated. All my music is on my computer and has not been moved yet iTunes suddenly can't find it and I am so mad right now!! When I went to update my iPod with the one new song I bought from iTunes it deleted EVERYTHING except my purchased music and now it can't find anything. WE're talking 500+ songs and I am really upset so I hope someone here has an answer!!

Moved iTunes library to Vista PC but iTunes 'can't find music files'. Help!

I'm running iTunes 7.1.1 on a new Vista PC and I followed the instructions on this support site for transferring the library using an iPod.
All songs (with artwork) are showing in the new PC's iTunes library, BUT all have a '!' symbol to the left and refuse to play. It offers to let me find them, but this would take hours for the thousands of tracks. I've tried consolidating but to no effect. All the music files are in the iTunes library folder, so why can't iTunes access them?
Can anyone help?

I'm running iTunes 7.1.1 on a new Vista PC and I
followed the instructions on this support site for
transferring the library using an iPod.
All songs (with artwork) are showing in the new PC's
iTunes library, BUT all have a '!' symbol to the left
and refuse to play. It offers to let me find them,
but this would take hours for the thousands of
tracks. I've tried consolidating but to no effect.
All the music files are in the iTunes library folder,
so why can't iTunes access them?
Can anyone help?
hi i to have a similar problem, i moved my music file for another problem i had and now it has removed all my files from itunes, albums and playlists as well, they are still on the pc and i have moved them back but i seem to have to start again, this will take weeks to do, i hope someone can help us.

Updated my itouch gen 4 32g to Ios 5 and now itunes can't find music files

I did a search and could not find anything about my specific issue. I was hoping to get some help if possible.
So I did the update to IOS 5 and everything went fine..........except for one thing. I have all my music stored on an external hard drive so I changed the media folder location to my external drive. When I did the update IOS changed the location to "C:\users\name\music\itunes\itunes media folder". I figured this is why itunes could not find the files. So I switched it back to my external drive and it still could not find my music files. The weird thing is that I can sync it and it won't delete the music from my ipod. All of the music is still on the ipod but not on itunes. I know I can manually go in and find all the folders but I REALLY don't want to have to do that. I have done it before and it took 7 hours. Since I don't use all the files I can't just drag the library over and problem solved.
One other strange thing that happened: After I did the update I downloaded an app off of the the appstore in itunes. This is the first app that I downloaded off of itunes and not straight off my ipod. I then recieved an email from apple saying it had been downloaded on a computer or device not associated with my apple id (which makes no sense seeing how the id on my ipod is the same as on itunes).
If anyone has a suggestion on how to fix the music problem, I am all ears. Thanks.

Once a track is in your iTunes library, you should not touch it except through iTunes. But I guess you know that now.
iTunes, to answer your question, cannot "refresh." If you re-add those files to your library, iTunes is unable to match them with the existing library entries, and will create a bunch of duplicate entries. This is a longstanding shortcoming of iTunes (and the source of lots of traffic on this fourm).
If there are "too many to manually" reassociate, then starting over, in the sense of deleting and then re-adding, may be a good plan.

ITunes can't find music files

Somehow my iTunes library got messed up, though everything worked fine before. I think that something happened when I did an iTunes upgrade but I am not sure anymore.
The library file is at
-- C:\Documents and Settings\i080151\My Documents\My Music\iTunes
and all my music is at an external HD at
-- G:\My Documents\My Music\iTunes\iTunes Music
In iTunes under Advanced I set it to the right music location, it says
-- G:\My Documents\My Music\iTunes\iTunes Music
On a side note I also have a library file at
-- G:\My Documents\My Music\iTunes
and it is a few months old, when the problem started. In any case, if I remember right the library file needs to be where iTunes is installed itself, and that is on C:. The library file on C: is current.
So all my music is on G:, my library shows all that music, but when I try to play any song I get the exclamation mark and that message that iTunes could not find the file.
When I today add a new music file, say a podcast, it gets properly added to the G: drive, shows up in iTunes, and I can play it there. I also see that the file date of the library file on C: gets updated to when I added the new podcast. But none of the older music files play.
I am confused... can someone help?

Try this as a test - open iTunes and tell it to get the old library from G:
Here aer directions on how to do that - don't create a new library, just hold down the shift key while starting iTunes and browse out to that old library file.
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=iTunesWin/7.5/en/15502.html
Does it find the old songs with the old library?
Something else to check-
Do you have any old libraries with a date near when you upgraded?
As mentioned in this article
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=301895

ITunes can't find music on my new computer, songs are 'unchecked' & won't play

I had iTunes installed on my old computer, and had lots of playlists set up. When I recently bought a new computer, I used an external hard drive to transfer all my music files to the new computer, and then I installed the latest version of iTunes on my new computer. When I opened iTunes, all my songs and playlists were listed, but all the songs had little exclamation points in front of them, and all were "unchecked" -- and therefore none of them will play. When I try to play a song, I get a message telling me iTunes cannot locate the file, and I have the option to locate it manually. I obviously don't want to do this tedious task for each and every song -- there must be a better way. Any solutions?

I suspect you missed out a step in the transfer process somewhere that was designed to avoid this situation...
The exclamation mark shows 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 cancel when asked to try 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.
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 .
Ctrl-click on an empty check box will check them all...
tt2

ITunes can't find music on external hard drive Help!

We moved my friend's iTunes music to an external hard drive. Everything was working fine until this week. Somehow the location of the music got changed back to her C drive. I redid the location but now every song has the exclamation mark. I would trash the music folder on the external drive and have her import the songs again from her DVD back ups but she has over 4,000 songs. Any other way to do this? I'm a Mac person so please explain the PC steps clearly. She is running Windows Vista.
Thanks for any help you can offer.

Somehow the location of the music got changed back to her C drive.
Because iTunes was started with the external drive not plugged in or not online and ready.
I redid the location but now every song has the exclamation mark
Select all the songs in iTunes, right click - Get info.

Itunes can't find music with two accounts on one compu ter

Hello,
My wife has the Ipod but we both want access to the main/master music library. I have the library in a shared folder which both accounts and read/write to. Now, if I add the Music folder on her account and sync the Ipod, everything is good. If I login and open itunes (the preferences have been changed to the same music folder) I get the dreaded "!".... After reading some of the help and support topics, I don't know why I can't play music from my account even though Itunes knows where the music is.
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Nevermind, I found the answer after a little digging.

ITunes can't find music & won't run at all

A couple weeks ago we changed servers. All of my iTunes music was on the old server; now it on the new server (with a different server name).
When I try to run iTunes an error message comes up saying iTunes cannot find or create the iTunes directory. When you acknowledge the error it simply drops back to Windows and never runs iTunes. You have no opportunity to go into preferences to tell it the new directory.
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When I try to run iTunes an error message comes up saying iTunes cannot find or create the iTunes directory.
this document is a good place to start with that one:
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ITunes can't find music source(???)

About a month ago a message popped up saying there was a new version of iTunes that I should download. When I sarted to, something happened and everything ended up being uninstalled. So I reinstalled but all the songs I had downloaded no longer had a "file source". They all show up on my iPod, they're all listed in my Library and Playlists but when I try to update (delete songs or move them to another playlist), I can't. Can't move songs to another playlist.

Pierre L. wrote:
The article HT2317, entitled "[Viewing album artwork on iPod|http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2317?viewlocale=en_US]", has been last modified on October 11, 2009. Why would it mention that option if it had been removed from iTunes 9.
Since when has the left hand known what the right hand is doing in any organiszation.
Can you give a reference supporting your statement ?
From Apple? No. Plenty of threads in here though, both builds of iTunes 9 released for Mac & PC have been missing this feature and people have given feedback. This is either a policy change and it will remain that way or it was accidentally omitted during the redesign in which case it may reappear in a future build. Either way the control isn't magically missing from just your copy, it's the same for all of us.
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Updated iTunes, now iTunes can't find music

I updated iTunes to version 9.1. Now when I try to play music, I get the following message: The song __ could not be used because the original file could not be found. Would you like to locate it?
The file is on an external hard drive and iTunes shows it correctly under Edit/Preferences/Advanced/iTunes Media folder location. But I think the update and the location have not synched.
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I am having the same issue. My library is located on an external hard drive. When I open Itunes after updating the version, Itunes told me it was updating my library. This takes about 2-3 hours and had to be done for every user in the house.
When you click on a song from a playlist Itunes says it cant find it. Yet when you go to the music icon above and search I find multiple copies of the same songs.
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ITunes can't find any of my music

I've been using iTunes for a long time now. I keep all my music on an external (portable) drive with the exception of podcasts or downloaded music from the store. All of a sudden iTunes can't find any of my music. Everytime I click on a song to play that is stored on that drive I get the "!" mark and a box that says itunes couldn't find the song, do I want to search for it. I really don't want to have to do that to all 3k songs. My drive is fine, the songs are there. Could my library file have been currupted? This every happen to anyone else?

Do what Katrina says and that will most likely fix it.
Usually, when this happens, it's because a new device has been added via USB, like even a thumb drive.
When windows boots up, it assigns drive letters to the external devices. If it does it out of order from what it used to do, that effectively changes the location of your music files.
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Once you fix that, your exclamation marks will disappear; you don't have to re-import or anything silly like that.

All of a sudden itunes can't find music

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