Cannot find music in album folders

Question

I just today thought I would do a little organizing of my music files on my PC with regards to iTunes. There are two profiles on the PC and so I moved the music files on both profiles to the Public folder of the computer and changed the default save location for both profiles for itunes for the public music folder. After that I went into both iTunes and clicked add folder to library which then showed the music for both profiles. I noticed I had some duplicates so I started to delete a few but then stopped the second that I noticed that a few of the one's that I had left had an exclamation point only to find out that iTunes could not locate the actual music file so I went back to the recycle bin and restored those files. Which leads me to the reason to that I'm here right now. I've just noticed that in the public folder in which my music files are suppose to be located that the artist and albums are there but when you click an individual album to look at the individual songs there are no MP4 files to be seen. For right now the music plays as it should through iTunes but why can't I see the music files themselves?

Answer 1

To accomplish what you want, you need to have a complete iTunes library (database + media) in a common location - typically this would be C:\Users\Public\Music\iTunes.  See turingtest2's notes on Make a split library portable for the steps that may be needed to bring your library into a suitable structure.  This will allow each user to access shared playlists, see all additions made to the library (by all users), etc.  The final structure of the iTunes folder and its subfolders should be like this:
Then, for each user, hold down SHIFT while starting iTunes - when you get this prompt:
click on Choose Library..., navigate to C:\Users\Public\Music\iTunes, select the iTunes Library.itl file you'll find there, and click Open (you'll only need to do this once for each user account).
Note, though, that iTunes is inherently a single-user application - any attempts to run iTunes at the same time will cause errors (and, in the worst case, possible corruption).  For this reason, its a good idea to disable fast user switching in Windows so that only one user can be logged in, and running iTunes, at the same time.