Apple Music loss links to songs

I have a 2018 Intel i5 mac mini, with an external (HD - USB 3.x) drive. Ventura. My iTunes library is stored on it, and the iTunes path goes to /My Passport for Mac/iTunes/iTunes Music. My songs are on the drive, all in the iTunes Music folder, within iTunes, and the playlist is correct, but it refuses to "find" and play the songs. iTunes will prompt to "The song “Come Inside” could not be used because the original file could not be found. Would you like to locate it?" and, when I manually locate files, iTunes will then prompt something to the affect of "would you like to use this to find the rest of your 6,0xx songs?". and it says it can't find them. I have tried option click to both make a new library and use the present one, but nothing seems to fix the problem. Then, when I quit and re- open Music, it loses some links and fixes others. How do I fix this? Thanks.