Original file could not be found??

I am having the same issue except I changed the location of my folder, then copied my existing files to the new location and now iTunes doesn't see them nor when I search for them do I find them. Any thoughts?

have you moved, renamed, deleted any folder by accident?

I deleted a file from itunes and now i can not play my songs through itunes it tells me file not found.i can add songs and listen to them but not the ones already there.

I had the same problem and it caused many hours of grief until i realized that I just needed to go into iTunes and double-click on the song. When it asks you if you want to do a look up, click yes, and it will take you to the iTunes folder. Look for the song by artist. If the song is in the folder, double-click the song and it will put it back in iTunes.

Don't know why it happens, but the fix is faster than having to reload all the music, which I started doing before figuring it out. Hope this helps.

I am having the same problem, But happen to me when I updated to the 7.4.1 version. What do I do ?

I am having a terrible problem with songs showing up with the exclamation!! When I click on it and choose to find the song, the hard drive directory doesn't have the file!! Does that mean that I've lost the song? I thought that songs would always be on my hard drive even if they fell off the library. I didn't do anything to these songs, I wasn't even playing them...they've just disappeared. Help, it's like I'm losing oxygen, fast!

I had the same problem a while back. What I did was search for all my music, files that end in .m4p

Then I saved all my music into one folder on my external hard-drive.

Then I deleted all the songs in iTunes.

I then re-opened iTunes and and in 'File' clicked on 'Add folder to Library'

Now everything works fine and no songs have that annoying excalmation mark.

Hope this helps.

I'm having exactly the same problem with a dialogue box appearing telling me that the original file could not be found. This is getting me down now especially as I reinstalled all 3000 songs into a new folder as described in the last post.
It ran fine for a week or so and then I began to get the ! sign before the song title. This applies to about half of my library but of course all of the ! disappear when iTunes is restarted.
There seems to be no obvious reason as to why it's happening and no obvious cure. I'm running iTunes 7.1.4.2
My entire library went missing about a month ago and I ended up reinstalling everything. Mmmm?

I have exactly the same problem but with slightly different flavor.

I'm new with iTunes and already did a lot of operations with my iTunes Music folder (which for me is c:/music, i changed in preferences music folder) for example I deleted or moved some songs without getting iTunes updated. Now in my iTunes for a lot of songs the following message appears:
"Song could not be used because original file could not be found".
I backed up all my files in safe place so I just want to update iTunes library with up-to-date state in my iTunes music folder(c:/music). In other words I just want that all songs with missing files just get disappeared from my iTunes library.

Can this be done automatically somehow(script, utility, fix,workarounds)?

p.s. I use Windows XP, iTunes 7.4.2.4