Songs and playlists disappearing from iTunes library

I desperately need iTunes help.  Anyone an expert out there?  I have spent A LOT if time transferring songs from my computer into my itunes library, and creating Playlists.  Then I sync my phone, and all seems fine.  But when I go back into iTunes to put another song on my phone, all the songs are gone.  Everything that I put into iTunes is gone, all playlists, and all the songs.  It's as if I was never in there.  This has happened twice now.  I don't want to recreate my library and playlists every time I open iTunes!!!!  But I can't just add one new song to my phone either, because as soon as a sync, everything that is already on my phone will be gone!!!  Grrrr!!  Anyone know what's going on??  The songs were not purchased through iTunes, if that makes a difference.

Apple's official advice on duplicates is here: Find and remove duplicate items in your iTunes library. It is a manual process and the article fails to explain some of the potential pitfalls such as lost ratings and playlist membership, or that sometimes the same file can be represented by multiple entries in the library and that deleting one and recycling the file will break the other.
Use Shift > View > Show Exact Duplicate Items to display duplicates as this is normally a more useful selection. You need to manually select all but one of each group to remove. Sorting the list by Date Added may make it easier to select the appropriate tracks, however this works best when performed immediately after the dupes have been created.  If you have multiple entries in iTunes connected to the same file on the hard drive then don't send to the recycle bin.
Use my DeDuper script if you're not sure, don't want to do it by hand, or want to preserve ratings, play counts and playlist membership. See this thread for background, this post for detailed instructions, and please take note of the warning to backup your library before deduping.
(If you don't see the menu bar press ALT to show it temporarily or CTRL+B to keep it displayed.)
The most recent version of the script can tidy dead links as long as there is at least one live duplicate to merge stats and playlist membership to and should cope sensibly when the same file has been added via multiple paths.
See also Make a split library portable for some thoughts on best practice when it comes to organizing the library and media files.
tt2

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