itunes won't play my songs

I am having the SAME problem. Did you ever find out what to do to fix it? My songs have the explaination mark too and if I go to locate file and I actually search for where to song is saved and I click on it then it will play and the mark will disappear, but I have well over 3,000 songs and I can't do that 3,000 times... So if you find some help please let me know! I'll do the same for you.

This happened to me and this is how it went...I imported all of my songs from Windows Media Player into ITunes. I thought that since they were in ITunes that I could delete them from WMP and save some space on my machine. Wrong. Once deleted, I encountered the same errors that you are experiencing. I ended up having to rip all songs from my cds again.

Same problem. It happened after I used the "Consolidate" command. My music is still on the hard drive, but iTunes can't "find" it.

Ditto. In my case, music was downloaded from eMusic. Many entries (not all)have "CONT" in the time column. Exclamation point appears after I select a song to hear, and "original can't be found".

Hello I don't know if this will help you, but I dragged my purchased music from my desktop to a usb then dragged them to my labtop. It played the songs fine, when I removed my usb and tried it later I got all exclamation points and wanted me to locate my songs. I have over a thousand songs and I was in no mood to click each and every song. I tried to consolidate the library, and it didn't work. Then I noticed I didnt have the usb with the files I copied so I put the usb back in and ran consolidate library again and it worked without the usb. I am not sure if this was the case for you but try and have the harddrive or where the files were originally and consolidate library again while connected to your computer. I hope this helps.

what is the "usb"?