My songs are duplicated i itunes but if i remove one entry, the other won't play anymore...what do i do?

After my friend transferred my songs to my new laptop, i have installed itunes. First i had 2 or 3 entries of the same song, because i had a music files (mostly
mp3), and the 2 entries were from Itunes music files. One entry played, the other wouldn't (exclamation point). As i have  a couple thousand songs, i decided to consolidate into Itunes Media, thinking i could then uninstall Itunes, Reinstall it and delete my Itunes music folder.
But it probably was the wrong way to go. Now I have an Itunes media folder and an Itunes music folder. If i delete one of them from my computer, itunes says it cannot find the track. But the problem is now it takes twice as much space on my computer and last but not least, almost every song is duplicated in Itunes.
If I delete one of the two entries, the song won't play (exclamation point again). it's like each file of the song exist in his own file, but cannot play if the other version of the song isn't there.
So i'm stuck with a duplicated list of songs in Itunes and 30 Go of songs on my laptop...<
any help would be greatly appreciated!
thanks!

I would guess that if they both point to the same file and you delete one of them, you have deleted the file. Therefore it is no longer there to be played.
I'm not really sure how you got into this situation.  I'm also not sure if you have multiple copies of the same songs on your drive or just multiple entries in the library. It sounds like you  haven't gotten very far, that you have not yet set up playlists that you would be heartbroken to lose. If you have room on your drive, I might suggest closing iTunes, renaming both of those media folders, then restarting iTunes and creating a brand new library.  I would set iTunes to copy media files to the library when it imports them so that it all gets consolidated. I would add the music folder (which is probably a sub-folder of those other folders) from one of your two existing folders and see what happens. Then I'd add the other.
As a normal precaution, I highly recommend backing up your two music folders before starting this. 
When all is done and you are happy, you should be able to delete the older folders.  This is the step that begs for a backup. First, though, I'd change the names of the two older folders again and see if iTunes plays your music. If not, it didn't make a copy and it's still looking in the old folders.  You might want keep them around for a while and only delete them when you need drive space.  I am loathe to delete anything unnecessarily, just in case there is a problem.
I'm not a Windows user so I can't help with the details on how to do this on a PC.

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