ALOT of my songs just disapeared!

Question

So i was using photoshop adn surfing the web when i opened itunes. it was going pretty slow and then this importing xml or something came up and i thought it was slowing everythign down so i clicked stop and exited everything i was doing. well when i opened itunes again, it only had 920 something songs out of my 1285! and when i plugged in my ipod, it said to import songs n i clicked yes and it didnt make a difference! i had atleast over 100 boughten songs from itunes and its only showing 22! PLEASE help, now my ipod has only the 920 something songs adn i think everything else just got wiped out. im so mad right now and dont know what to do. please please help.

Answer 1

Perhaps the iTunes perferences for Keep.. & Copy were reset...?
Apple's official advice on duplicates is here... HT2905 - How to find and remove duplicate items in your iTunes library. It is a manual process and the article fails to explain some of the potential pitfalls such as lost playlist membership.
Use Shift > View > Show Exact Duplicate Items to display duplicates as this is normally a more useful selection. You need to manually select all but one of each group to remove. Sorting the list by Date Added may make it easier to select the appropriate tracks, however this works best when performed immediately after the dupes have been created.  If you have multiple entries in iTunes connected to the same file on the hard drive then don't send to the recycle bin.
Use my DeDuper script if you're not sure, don't want to do it by hand, or want to preserve ratings, play counts and playlist membership. See this thread for background and please take note of the warning to backup your library before deduping.
(If you don't see the menu bar press ALT to show it temporarily or CTRL+B to keep it displayed)
When there are two physical copies of the same track my script will favour the older track as the one to keep, which should suit your purposes.
tt2