Why does iTunes losi track of where my music is?

If iTunes often forgets where your music is stored and displays a ‘File Not Found’ excla­mation mark, the read-son may be that you store your music on an external device iTunes can’t always connect to.

When I use iTunes to load music onto my iPod, I have to tell iTunes where I keep my files, by dragging them into the iTunes library. This creates a link for each song, informing iTunes of where to find it—but when I dis­connect my portable hard drive, the links become invalid; so iTunes displays a ‘File Not Found’ error and asks me to reconfirm where the file is on my hard drive.

To stop this problem from hap­pening, open the File menu in iTunes, navigate to the Library section, and select Organize Library.... From here, check the box next to Consolidate Files, and iTunes will create copies of every media file played via iTunes in the iTunes Media folder, which ought to be located on your PC’s inter­nal storage. This method may cause your hard drive to fill up with media files in the long term, but it will eliminate those annoy­ing ‘File Not Found’ errors.