Where are my iTunes media files going?

I have lost songs several times. I go to play a song, and iTunes can't locate the file and there is a next to the title. Sometimes it's only one or two songs from an album, sometimes the whole album. Sometimes it's CDs I own and have ripped, sometimes music downloaded from the internet. Many are no longer downloadable. There doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason. I just checked and 1/4 of my extensive library is missing; that's about 500 songs! I have not moved these files - I didn't even know where to find them in the finder until yesterday. They don't appear to be anywhere on my hard drive. I've checked "get info" to see where they are supposed to be, but they aren't there. I've searched via spotlight and they can't be found anywhere. Luckily, I do have everything backed up to my time capsule and I CAN find them there from July 29. It's a real pain to find them there an bring them back. I haven't figured out how to bring them all back at once, just one song or album at a time... all 500 of them:-(
Any idea what's happening? Was there a new version of iTunes released during August that I didn't notice? This has happened to me quite a few times and it's really frustrating that I never know when my music is going to evaporate. I'm ready to go back to burning CDs - especially for the ones that can't be replaced.

I'm using a MacBook Pro with osx 10.7.4. iTunes 10.

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