Help needed, various bugs in itunes and with my ipod

Question

Hello, I thought this would be the best board to post this since the problem is mainly associated with itunes. Simply, my itunes library has been erased completely including songs purchased from the itunes store. However, for those who think they may be able to help me, I will give some more details.
I am sorry for the amount of text, however I feel it is better to give all details now than have to keep answering questions. Please bear with me, this problem has caused me a lot of inconvenience, and I would love to get it fixed.
1 week ago I followed a link from youtube to purchase a song from the itunes store. I trust this link to be reliable in the sense it had no viruses or the like. However, upon doing this, the itunes configuration that appears when you first install itunes. I followed the prompts to agree to the terms and conditions for itunes (from my memory, I was not particularly concentrating at this time). Then the wizard closed and itunes popped up. My library was completely empty. I closed itunes and reopened it, library still empty. I restarted my computer, same again. I then spent a while trying to add my music back to itunes, however lots was not on my hard drive anymore.
I then tried using a utility I found online to extract songs off my ipod to my computer, as my ipod had all the songs from my library that I wanted back. This worked partially, because of the effectiveness of the program.
I then tried to use an old library file as advised to based on a basic google search. This restored lots of the files, all sorted, as they were not sorted when I got them off the ipod. However, lots of the files now come up with an exclamation mark next to the name, indicating the file cannot be found. I have searched for these files, and they are nowhere on my hard drive or recycle bin.
Now, I was annoyed and inconvenienced by this greatly however I still had all my music on my ipod.
Then my ipod (second gen. ipod touch) crashed. The music presumably became unreadable or corrupted because the ipod showed no music on it. I had to restore the factory settings on my ipod, and now I have lost a lot of my music. I have tried to restore from one of the backups itunes created, however this did not restore my music, in fact, I don't know what it did.
So in summary, I have lost a lot of the music which I bought off the itunes store. This is greatly distrissing. Additionally, my ipod will not sync all the time now, with an error stating "the disc is unreadable" or words to that effect. I would really like to get my music back, and it would take a very long time to list all these songs in an email to apple asking for free redownload of these songs I already purchased. I would like to know if there is any way to get my songs back, explanation of what happened, how I can prevent this, any advice really. I understand I should have made a backup on another computer or external hard drive, however I believed that the 'backup' of the songs all on my ipod would be suffiencient. Please help if you can, I have already spent about 7 hours searching and working to fix this problem. It would be so very much appreciated.
Message was edited by: alocus

Answer 1

When I imported the files the first time I did type the new genre in the genre field of the info box. You can either choose a pre defined genre or type a new one. As soon as a new one was entered it is available in the drop down for any future imports.
I have around 15000 songs assigned to the different genres. For only a couple of 100 I have the problem which I described.