Music plays in iTunes, but NONE of the MP3 files are visible in Explorer

Question

This one is a bit of a mystery.
When I open up any of the folders in my iTunes Music folder, they appear to be empty. No MP3 files are listed at all. Yet, iTunes can still play the music.
Here are the details:
1. I keep my iTunes media content on an external hard drive, and iTunes is working fine. Some albums have disappeared but most of my music shows up in iTunes and plays properly. Therefore, the music files have to be there.
2. When I right-click on my iTunes folder in Windows Explorer and choose "properties" I get a result: Explorer scans the folder and tells me I have 98.8 gigabytes in 18,279 files, (though when I look around, I see that a LOT of albums are missing). Yet, Windows Explorer is finding a lot of files even though I can’t see them.
3. However, when I right-click on a folder inside my iTunes folder and choose “properties” (the folders for each artist and for each album are still there and still visible) I get weird results. It says that there is some small amount of data in each folder (27 kilobytes or 35 kilobytes) and some random number of files (2, or 5, or 6). It doesn't matter how many songs are actually on that album, it just gives me this small unrelated number. Yet, I can’t see any files listed at all.
4. Under the View tab in Folder Options, everything looks fine to me. I don’t see a setting there that would hide MP3 files.
5. I tried checking “show hidden files” and all that sort of thing, but nothing changed.
6. I did a virus scan and it revealed no threats.
7. I also went into the Command Prompt and used the dir command to see what was there. I could see all of my folders including my iTunes music folder. I have pictures, Word documents, Excel files, etc on this external folder as well. I can see all of these files no problem. I can also see all the Artist and Album folders in my iTunes music folder. However, even using the dir command, I can’t see any songs – there are no MP3 files visible. I reveal hidden and system files (dir /ah), I then see some files like these:
desktop.ini
AlbumArtSmall.jpg
Folder.jpg
8. I tried to play the music from VLC media player and Windows Media Player, but that doesn’t work because the files can’t be seen by those programs either.
9. However, when I open iTunes, all the music is there and playable. Only iTunes sees the music.
Anyone have any idea what could have happened? The one thing I changed recently is that I ran the iTunes Genius function. It scanned my music and did what it was supposed to do, and it worked fine. I doubt that Genius could have done this to my external hard drive. I’m guessing I picked up a computer virus somehow, but my virus scan doesn’t reveal anything.
Anyone have any ideas about what is going on?
Thanks!
Doug

Answer 1

OMG!!!!!!!!!!
You were absolutely right, Rob. I couldn't believe it when I saw it. I've got nearly 200 Artist folders with 1,000 or so Album folders - and they are all completely empty of music.
But in the middle of that long list of folders, there is an innocuous looking folder labelled "Music." I looked inside that folder and, bam, there they were - all 92 gigabytes of my missing music files in a complete copy of all those Artist and Album folders.
I thought I was going crazy! How could iTunes be playing all this music when as far as I could tell, it had all vanished? But there it was. As you said, iTunes had simply moved it down a level in the folder hierarchy and then didn't delete all the original folders.
And as I scanned the original list of Artist folders, I also saw the other folders: Podcasts, Audiobooks, iPod Games, etc. I hadn't even noticed them before. I just assumed that all the folders I was looking at were Artist folders.
Thank you so much, Rob. I'm not sure I would have ever solved this "case of the missing music files" on my own. I would have continued to bang my head against "hidden files" settings and all that. Perhaps I would have tracked these files down by looking for their location using "Get Info" in iTunes. But maybe not. I had no reason to suspect that I didn't know where the music files were: after all, the Artist and Album folders were all right there. They were just empty! I was so focused on the folders being empty, it never occured to me that iTunes had created exact duplicate folders somewhere else.
Do you know if iTunes had any practical reason for leaving all those empty folders behind? I'm just wondering if it is safe to manually delete them. I noticed, for example, that they aren't completely empty. They contain hidden files of Album Art and various ini files. I wouldn't want to delete them and then find out that I just deleted all my album art and a bunch of important settings files.
Thanks again. You saved my neck with this one.
Doug