Problem with iTunes library: Music files disconnected from iTunes library and album artwork?

[Reimund]

Good morning/afternoon/evening. Can anyone help me figure out my latest computer problem? Its very frustrating and any advice would be appreciated very much. When I click on an album cover in my iTunes library I get a box with the message, 'The song............could not be used because the original file could not be found. Would you like to locate it?' I click on 'locate' and a box opens with the heading iTunes and giving me the opportunity to locate my iTunes Media Folder from its location on my Desktop. I click that, then on 'Automatically add to iTunes,' but nothing happens. The folder does not move to the File name space next to the Open button. Within the iTunes folder is another folder labeled Music. When I click on that I see all of my iTunes tracks and their details. This happened when I was trying to back up my iTunes library, I followed iTunes support instructions. I wanted to make a copy of my library and then save it on an external hard drive. I think I should have just subscribed to iTunes Match. I would like to re-establish the link between my iTunes music and my iTunes library on my Windows laptop, but then I may move away from iTunes by converting my existing files into a format compatible with Android so I can play them on my Android mobile phone and tablet.

[4SaleUSA]

Just a shot in the dark…what happens if you try to "undo" that change that led to all this by recreating the original paths. (I'm assuming the "missing" files were either copied (not moved) to another location on the original drive, or "moved" (copied) to another drive; else iTunes should be able to locate them by their unique file IDs).

But iTunes should still look for the files based on path; so what happens if you recreate those original paths? Quick experiments here seem to work fine (I copied from one external drive to another, thus changing the file ID; then I trashed the original, and confirmed that iTunes couldn't locate the track. To recover, I quit iTunes, disconnected the source external, renamed the destination external to the source drive's name, and rebooted. Recreated the original's folder path on the renamed external, fired up iTunes, and it worked. The reboot was p'bly unnecessary, but only took a minute.)

Maybe worth a shot...you could try it with just one or two tunes to see how it goes. If you can't remember the original pathnames, they'll be in the iTunes Library.xml file.