I cannot access iTunes songs showing in external hard drive

I recently closed my dropbox account and moved its content to an external hard drive. This included iTunes songs and now the songs and related albums no longer show in iTunes when I open it up, although I can see the individual songs (but not in albums) in the external hard drive. There are a limited number of albums still showing when I open up iTunes but they are albums I have recently added to iTunes.
However I can see the albums and tracks in the iTunes media folder on my Mac internal hard drive, but they do not show up when I actually open up Itunes.I have followed advice found on this website and have tried to move my iTunes folder to the external drive so all the music is in one place, but i keep getting an 'error code 50' message appearing. I have also tried to select the individual songs on the hard drive and move them to the media folder but there are no 'albums' to move them into and they just sit there as individual songs. I have a macbook air which is one year old and a WD My Passport ultra 1TB external hard drive. I am using OSX version 10.9.5 with 8GB of memory. As you can tell from my endeavours, I do not really understand the way iTunes works and it may be that the various songs and albums in the media folder need to be organised in a different way perhaps, so that they are visible when I open up iTunes?
As I have lots of space on my external hard drive and am running out of space on my Mac hard drive, ideally I would like all my iTunes folders to be held on my external drive, as it is always plugged in to my Mac, and for iTunes to be 'pointed' to the hard drive. Any advice please?
Thanks
Elizabeth

All kinds of things going on.
About the error code. Do you men "50" or do you mean "-50"? It is critical things get reported exactly here. Error -50 is a very unhelpful generic communications error with a number of possible causes. Something between the drive to which you are downloading and the drive from which it is all coming is not working correctly, with probably dozens of possibilities. I guess one simple possibility is if this is a brand new drive it likely came formatted for Windows use and needs reformatting for Mac.
Kappy's brief drive formatting instructions (12/2012) - https://discussions.apple.com/message/20571091#20571091
Pondini: Formatting, Partitioning, Verifying, and Repairing Disks... - http://pondini.org/OSX/Home.html, specifically http://pondini.org/OSX/DU1.html
Basic workings of iTunes. When you add a file to iTunes it puts the file in a specific location designated in you Media Folder preferences setting and makes a note in a database file (library.itl) of where it put it. When you want to play the track iTunes looks up where the file should be, goes there and plays that file. iTunes does not inventory its media folder for new additions. For iTunes to recognize tracks they have to be added to iTunes either by importing, dragging to iTunes, or dragging to the Automatically Add to iTunes folder. If files added to iTunes are later moved by you in Finder, particularly to another drive, iTunes loses track of them completely and give you a broken link indicator " ! ".
What are the iTunes library files? - http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1660
More on iTunes library files and what they do - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITunes#Media_management
What are all those iTunes files? - http://www.macworld.com/article/139974/2009/04/itunes_files.html
Where are my iTunes files located? - http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1391
iTunes 9 [and later]: Understanding iTunes Media Organization - http://support.apple.com/kb/ht3847 - plus supplemental information about organizing to new structure https://discussions.apple.com/message/26404702#26404702
Image of folder structure and explanation of different iTunes versions (turingtest2 post) - https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-7392 and making an iTunes library portable.
I don't know exactly how Dropbox works but basically by moving all your files instead of letting iTunes do the relocating you have broken all the links to your older files in iTunes. You can either repair them one by one, by one, by one.... or you can rebuild your library, or essentially create a new library and start over again (you did read those links I provided didn't you?). If you are prepared to start over, hold down the option key while starting iTunes. Create a new library on the external drive. Drag all your media files to the Automatically Add to iTunes folder in the iTunes folder on that drive.

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tt2

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I cannot access iTunes songs showing in external hard drive

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