The iTunes notifier (exclamation point at the farthest left)

These "!" mean that iTunes can't find the song file. Do you have duplicates in your library--one working file and one "!" file? If you do, you can safely delete the "!" files.

But, if these "!" files are supposed to be your library files, then you need to tell iTunes where to find the songs (the original location must have been changed).

Unfortunately, this isn't that easy if you have playlists, playcounts, ratings, etc. that you're trying to preserve. If any of these things matter to you, then you'll have to individually point iTunes to the new song location for each "!" song you find. (There are some scripts out there that very smart people have written to try to make this process easier--but I haven't used them, so I have so recommendations or advice about them. You can search these forums (when the search feature is reactivated) to see if you can find help with this.

If none of these external song "fact" things matter, then you can simply delete these "!" songs and re-import the folder where all your music is stored.

I can't keep up with all the ! marks appearing.
They appear indiscriminately. When I check in my tunes/ itunes folder the files are still there.
Click on file to play, delete previous listing in library and fine but eventually the same problem occurs.
There doesn't seem to be any pattern to this.
No sooner have I fixed one problem than another appears.

I don't know of a direct way to do this, but there is a very talented person on these boards who writes scripts for these things. (Unfortunately my link to his pot of gold is broken---google stepped in and squashed him! HMMMMM!)

Anyway, I have this link left:

http://ottodestruct.com/blog/2005/10/20/itunes-javascripts/

Please note these two links, esp.:

Finds dead tracks in your library and makes a list of them: http://ottodestruct.com/itunes/FindDeadTracks.txt
Removes dead tracks from your library (this one was actually written by Apple originally, I’m just including it for completeness): http://ottodestruct.com/itunes/RemoveDeadTracks.txt

Please know that I have never tried any of these things--so I am in no way endorsing them! I truly don't know if they work! It's up to you to test the waters!

Good Luck!

Click on the column with the exclamation points to see if you can sort that column. If so, then click the first one holding down the shift key & scroll to the last one and click, still holding the shift key, and all should be selected. Then hit delete. That'll remove the bad listings from the library.

It's really important that anytime you want to move, rename, delete or add songs to your iTunes library that you do it within iTunes. ITunes only keeps track of what happens while you're using the program. If you use Windows Explorer or similar to make changes, iTunes doesn't record those.

If you want to rebuild your entire library to add any files on the hard disk that are missing from the iTunes library, there are other posts on the topic or send me a message and I'll tell you how.

sigh read the top of the script! <pre>/* Rename me to FindDeadTracks.js
Double Click in Explorer to run</pre>

http://home.comcast.net/~teridon73/itunesscripts/