My songs won't play because the original file can't be found.  Please help.

I cannot play any of the songs in my iTunes. Whenever I try to play a song an error message pops up. It reads, "The song could not be used because the original file could not be found. Would you like to locate it?" I have to search for the song on my hard drive in order for it to play. This process works but it would be very timely and tedious to go through each one of my 5300 songs to get them to play. Is there a faster way of doing this? Please help. Thanks.

The "missing file" thing 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, or that 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.
Select a track with an exclamation mark, use Ctrl-I to get info, then say no when asked to locate the track. Look on the summary tab for the location that iTunes thinks the file should be. Now take a look around your hard drive(s). Hopefully you can locate the track in question. If a section of your library has simply been moved, or a drive letter has changed, it should be possible to reverse the actions. I can provide a step by step guide if you give me the two paths.
In some cases iTunes may be able to repair itself if you go through the same steps and locate the lost track. It may then offer to attempt to automatically fix other broken links. Alternatively, as long as you can find a location holding the missing files, then you should be able to use my FindTracks script to reconnect them to iTunes.
tt2

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    Some of the songs I have downloaded into i tunes won't play when I select it to do so.  The error message I get is "The song can not be used because the original file can not be found.  Would you like to locate it?"  When I select yes I'm sent to a screen that has my i tunes library listed.  When I select the song in question I'm asked if I would like to open the song.  When I select this option I get nothing.  The songs I have downloaded must be somewhere because they are listed in my i tunes library and on the screen I've been sent to.  I can't the songs to play however.  This is not true of all of my songs but it is true of quite a few of them.  Actually, one song is too many.    How do I get my music to play that seems to be locked up somewhere in the computer?

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