Itunes can not locate some music files

Question

I have a large music collection of approx. 35k songs. A few days ago about 10% of my music appeared in itunes with that exclamation point symbol and basically lost its location. If I click in the song it says that it could not locate file. The audio files are correctly placed in the itunes music folder but manually relinking them will take me forever. I have tried changing the location of the itunes music, updating library and consolidating library (even though my music was all in one folder) and it did not work. Any ideas? Cheers, Roberto

Answer 1

I cannot speak for the Windows user, as I do not know whether the program acts as it does on a Mac.
For the Mac, though, Roberto may consider this recommendation. It may end up as a very long process since he mentions that he has 35000 tracks in his library.
There are two alternatives: the first would have you removing all of your iTunes files EXCEPT the one containing the actual music files. If your music files are stored independently on an external disk, all the better, as this means you can dispose of all of the files and folders INSIDE the folder called "Music" in your personal directory. Doing so will destroy all of the ancillary information that concerns your music library including artwork, but if you copy the contents to an external drive before you delete it on the startup, you will be able to retrieve it if it is not available at the iTunes store. After you have deleted the files, restart the computer, open iTunes and check your preferences. The preferences should be set to the way that you had them prior to this deletion. You should also verify that there are NO music items in your library before you proceed.
Once you are satisfied that your preferences are set properly (and you have logged into the iTunes store for the cover art), choose ADD TO LIBRARY from the FILE menu. A window will appear that will allow you to navigate to your iTunes music folder. DO NOT OPEN the folder containing all the music, but click once on it then click CHOOSE, and the process of reentering all of the files will begin. Depending on the actual file size/type, this process may take as much as several hours. You may want to stay with the computer while this process is ongoing in the event that iTunes sends you an alert message.
The alternative to this would have you leaving your iTunes folder exactly as it is but following the exact same procedure outlined above. Unfortunately, this method could take much much longer, as iTunes will stop at each of the albums that make up the library to ask whether you want to delete the original or not (the answer would be YES). This would be preferable if, like me, the user has a lot of cover art that is not available through the iTunes store (I have about 20K classical music tracks that come from CDs long out of print, so this would save time scanning artwork). I would not recommend this alternative unless more than 60% of the listings are posing problems.