HT1751 I successfully captured a recent itunes library, but then all the songs have "!" marks next to them and won't play. I have thousands of songs in multi folders of my external hard drive, surely there is a way to auto locate all songs on my hard driv

My desktop PC recently crashed and I'm trying to recapture all of my iTunes library playlist and songs. I was able to successfully capture the library, however when I tried to play a song, all have the exclamation mark "!" on them and ask that I locate the song. I successfully located some, but there has to be an automatic way to do this, rather than finding each one. I have thousands of songs located in multiple folders of my exteernal hard drive and need a way to find all songs automatically. Can someone help? Thanks!

This "original file cannot be found" thing happens 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 .
tt2

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