Songs lost to altered path name

Question

So I am one of many who have lost thousands of songs in itunes for reasons I don't understand.  When I query the song with "get info" I get a "can't locate the song" dialogue box which I close and the info dalogue box then appears.  It seems that a few thousand songs have the file path names altered to read file://local host/  then the correct drive letter and folders etc.  Some have only "local host/drive letter/etc".  itunes can't find them because the path name is altered, but how did that happen and how can I undo it?  This is the second time I have lost more than 5000 songs to some mysterious action in this program.  I really don't want to burn hours and hours re- ripping those CDs

Answer 1

Thank you for your attention to this
Usually the path name reported by get info looks like this:  file://localhost/C:/users/Don Broderson/music/iTunes/iTunes media/Gillian   Welch/Soul Journey/10 Wrecking Ball.m4a.  In this case the tune is missing altogether, though it used to be on an external hard drive F:  as in the following case:
Path as listed in get info:  file://localhost/C:/users/Don Broderson/music/iTunes/iTunes Media/Bob Dylan/Another side of Bob Dylan/03 Spanish Harlem Incident.m4a   
Actual path:  In this case the tune resides on the external drive at F:\music\Bob Dylan\Bob Dylan\Another Side of Bob Dylan\03 Spanish Harlem Incident.m4a
When this problemm began, I saw path names rom get info that began localhost/F:\  and continued as in the dylan case above.  I could not find an example of that path in a quick search today.
I have iTunes set up to import CDs automatically to the F: drive as the hard disk in my laptop does not have the capacity for my library.  This has worked well for a couple of years and now it doesn't.  To my knowledge I never asked iTunes to organize my library.  I don't recall upgrading iTunes around the time the trouble started.  Any ideas?