cannot locate songs in my iTunes library – help please

when i try to play a track via my iTunes library i get the following message;

“the song xxxxx could not be used because the original file could not bne found. do you want to locate the file”

i keep all my iTunes on an external hard drive which is ok. If i locate a track on the hard drive and play it it plays in iTunes ok

i did download a free piece of music via google last night which went straight into iTunes – this took a while to download and maybe this has caused the problem?

what is the best way to rectify this issue?
I am not a pc “techie”

can i delete my iTunes library and then transfer everything from my iPod back to my iTune library?

do i need to uninstall iTunes from my pc, download it agin and then transfer everything from my iPod back to my iTune library?

what is the best software to do the above (either free or bought) bearing in mind i have over 7,000 tracks, 20 or so films, hundreds of photos etc. Is there any software that puts the music in “name”, ” artist”, “album”, “genre” etc and transfers the playlists, albums from my iPod into my iTunes on my pc?

any other suggestions?

many thanks

Hi Gooner,

Did you have all your music on your PC as well as the external HDD? The location of your music library is set in Preferences on the Advanced tab (if I rem correctly), default for Windoze version is something like C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Application Data\iTunes\Music, so if you store your library on external HDD it’s maybe reverted back to the default path (perhaps you launched iTunes without the HDD connected?). Change path to point to the location where you store your music and you should be back in business.

NB: The sync process in iTunes is one way, so music on your iPod isn’t transferred to your PC.

Hope that helps. Pete

I’m having the same problem or at least similar i tried to fix it by removing and reloading itunes but now i’m left with 2 listings of everything, one that will play and one that won’t.

I’ve tried what Pete said but it hasn’t fixed it for me, or at least i still get the message for 1 listing???

Anyone know how to delete duplicates, i know how to view them but not delete?