Recreating library from file hierarchy on disk

I lost the drive my iTunes Library was on (but not my music). most of the music is from CD's I imported into itunes, and is stored hiearchically (sp?) - that is to say:
artist|album|song
Where artist and album are directories, and song is the file itself.
When I add the folder all my music is in into the library all I get is the song title, that is to say its not using the album and artist directories.
Now, not 100% of the files are stored like this, and oddly some of those come out okay.
Is there a way to fix this? Somewhere I read I would have to add tags to ever single file in order to get itunes to add it to the library properly. I would rather not have to reimport 100 or so CD's which I alread have stored on my HDD.
Thanks!

I should mention they are all stored as .wav files, since the Mixing software I use works only with this or MP3. I have read about batch converting all my files to AIFF, will it pick up the path info and generate new files with the correct info if I do this?
I am thinking of perhaps using perl or another scripting tool to rename all the files based on the path structure so that:
artist/album/track.wave
would become
artist/album/artistalbumtrack.wav
then see if reimporting those files to itunes makes the library rebuild work.
Or spend quite a few hours re-ripping all my cd's ;(

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