Music is greyed out on iPod touch, it reads as empty, but files are still there?

Hi all,
I have a 32g iPod Touch that has never had a problem thus far.
Yesterday, I connected it as usual and went to play a song from the iPod via iTunes. The song played perfectly fine. I had the iPod on shuffle, and after that song was over, it went through every song and "greyed them out" with the symbol. I then unconnected it and reconnected it. On the iPod itself, it states that I have "no content." Yet all of the music files are *still there* when I reconnect the iPod, but they're greyed out.
I have reconnected/unconnected it numerous times (all safely) to try and figure this out. Sometimes, when I connect the iPod, the bar on the bottom of the information page shows that I have 24-ish gigs of music--which is correct. But out of nowhere, the bar will go back to saying that I only have apps and photos, no audio. I've restarted iTunes, restarted my computer, restarted the actual iPod--nothing helps.
I can't sync the entire library back to iTunes because I manually manage my songs and most of the music is on an external hard drive. I'm aware that this means that the songs are greyed out in iTunes because the actual file isn't there. However, this has never been a problem on the actual iPod before.
I updated my iPod to 5.1 earlier this week with no problems. I haven't added any new music to the iPod itself. I literally did nothing different from usual. I do have songs from other sources than iTunes, which could mean a corrupt file, but I didn't add anything new in the past week.
I'm aware that a restore would fix this, and I'm okay with doing that...however, I'm more concerned as to WHY this happened in the first place. The loss of files came out of nowhere, with no improper syncs or improper disconnects, no new music, no new updates and nothing new being done. I just don't want to put all of the songs back on the iPod and have this happen again.
Anyone have any ideas? Thanks. :]

Try this previous discussion:
https://discussions.apple.com/message/1552107#1552107

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