ITunes cannot locate my music from my external hard drive

I am using the most uptodate software for mac book and itunes. Having followed all other discussions and located the media folder using preferences itunes still cannot locate my music, this is really frustating! All of my music is the the itunes media folder within the itunes folder on my external harddrive and it still wont find the music. Futher to this my library should have about 50,000 songs in it but itunes library is only showing 354 songs that all have the ! sign beside them.
Please can someone help me as this is annoying!
PS. this method worked fine on my windows until itunes had updated, since the recent update and my move to macbook pro my media cannot be found

Oops, excuse me I think I misread the initial problem.
This solution might be more on track, though I don't understand why the 354 songs your library does list are broken...
Empty/corrupt library after upgrade/crash
Hopefully it's not been too long since you last upgraded iTunes, in fact if you get an empty/incomplete library immediately after upgrading then with the following steps you shouldn't lose a thing or need to do any further housekeeping. In the Previous iTunes Libraries folder should be a number of dated iTunes Library files. Take the most recent of these and copy it into the iTunes folder. Rename iTunes Library.itl as iTunes Library (Corrupt).itl and then rename the restored file as iTunes Library.itl. Start iTunes. Should all be good, bar any recent additions to or deletions from your library.
See MusicFolder Files Not Added and Super Remove Dead Tracks for tools to catch up with any changes since the backup file was created.
tt2

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This work for the most part:
https://discussions.apple.com/message/20361846#20361846

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As Chris says... but if the media is on an external drive as above then you also need to make sure the external drive has the same drive letter on the system you are moving to or iTunes won't be able to find the files.
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tt2

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Hello B3NN13,
If you would like to add the music from your external hard drive to iTunes without copying it to the iTunes Library on your internal hard drive, you may find the following article helpful:
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I moved my music to an external hard drive to free up space on my old laptop. Since I moved to a new laptop, iTunes never seems to find the music. I have to go through and manually select a song for it to find it one and then it says should it use this to find the rest of the songs. Then it crashes. I have reinstalled iTunes tonight with no real improvement. I want to be able to create a playlist to upload to my new iPad as well as updating music on my iPod but I can't do any of it. Please, any advice!

angelafromlanchester wrote:
I moved my music to an external hard drive to free up space on my old laptop. Since I moved to a new laptop, iTunes never seems to find the music.
Has the new laptop given the external drive a different drive letter?
The "missing file" error 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, one of its parent folders, or 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.
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In some cases iTunes may be able to repair itself if you go through the same steps with Get Info but this time click Locate and browse to the lost track. It may then offer to attempt to automatically fix other broken links.
If another application like Windows Media Player has moved/renamed the files then the chances are that subtle differences in naming strategies will make it hard to restore the media to the precise path that iTunes is expecting. In such cases, as long as the missing files can be found somewhere, you should be able to use my FindTracks script to reconnect them to iTunes. See this post for an explanation of how it works.
tt2

ITunes cannot locate my music from my external hard drive

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