Exclamation marks next to songs in Itunes!

Yes the holding Option down worked for me too. Not only did I have these random exclamation marks pop up but I knew that I had copied about 50 CD's to my library which weren't there anymore and I had no idea where they went. I held down the "option" key while I opened Itunes and this gave me the option to search the Itunes Files. I did this and located the original file which I chose and "voila" when it reloaded all of my songs / albums where there, together with all of the ones that I had copied which had disappeared. The only thing that went wrong was that I had a heap of audio books on my computer and all of these are gone. I'm not sure why or how I get them back but I am relieved to have all my music back.

If anyone knows how to get the audio books back I would be grateful

A little late to the party, but I found I had exclamation marks on half my songs in Itunes and now I have almost all my songs marked with exclamation points after following Don's suggestion, but now I also only have one song each instead of two. I found the file in my external drive but this didn't work for me. I went back and tried a second time but nothing changed. Now almost my entire library is unplayable. Holding the option key while starting Itunes didn't work. I just looked back on the external drive and the file that I asked to be transfered, the Itunes library, is in ghost print and not clickable so I can't try again. Any idea on what else can be done?

Ok, after a long time fooling around here, what worked for me was to click on a song to play, and when it the banner up asking if Itunes should try to locate the song, I clicked yes to that, and it took me to the general location of the Itunes folder and I had to search through the artist files and find the exact song, click on that and another banner came up asking if I would like Itunes to use the location of X Song to find others and add them to the library. I clicked yes and it Itunes seems to search and move that entire album, maybe more, and finishes with a banner telling you how many songs remain missing. I've been going down the list clicking, hunting, agreeing and watching the exclamation points disappear but it's going to be a long process. I tried to go back and have Itunes import the entire library from the external location, but no go. Seems it will only go song by song with the option to have Itunes use that song to find others. Geeze. Here's an opportunity to make some money, techies. Thanks to all for posting. I tried all the suggestions and came up with this version that worked for me.

Yes! I finally got an answer. After hours of trying everything posted plus some, I did something really simple and it worked. I disconnected my external drive (which has a back-up of my Itunes Music on it) and then turned my computer off. I turned my computer back on, waited for the reboot, and confirmed that the external device did not appear under devices. I then opened Itunes and highlighted all my music files in the music library, and then hit delete. The banner came up asking if I was sure I wanted to delete and instead I hit cancel which unhighlighted the list, AND removed all the exclamation marks. By disconnecting the external drive, Itunes was forced to look for the music on the Mac hardrive where it all still existed after I moved a copy of the library from the external to the mac when I first started having issues with the exclamation marks, and all the duplicates are gone too.

My entire Itunes Music Library is intact with everything still there, uploaded cd's, downloaded music, etc., and it all plays fine. For me and my system, disconnecting the external drive forced Itunes to look for the library on my mac hardrive, which it did, and it put everything back in order. I have a back up of my library on the external drive and maybe that confused Itunes regarding location when I first moved the music library there when I was running out of space on my mac hardrive. I did not change the location in Itunes however and so the exclamation marks showed up at some point when I next had a look at the list. I moved the library back onto my mac hardrive with a copy on the external and when I asked for the location information, it had more than one place to identify and it became confusing. Unplugging the external was they key. Don't know what will happen when I attach my Terrabyte drive back to the Mac, but I think it will be nothing. Now that it has identified the location, the list is good. I'm not a techie, just tenacious. I have no idea if this will work for anyone else, but here you have it. Thanks for asking, and I hope it works for you.

I agree with therippedopffclient. There is very little that I like about Apple as a company. Their support stinks, hence all of the forums and user groups doing the job that Apple should be doing. BTW, Version 11 of iTunes stinks.

I'm having the same issue, only in a slightly different way: I'm getting the exclamation point indicating the file doesn't exist, but this is for a song that was purchased on my iPod touch (1st gen). I also haven't yet had a chance to download the file onto my computer. Would it be possible to try and download it onto my computer claiming that it wasn't downloaded after it was purchased?

That youtube video was the most help I've gotten so far! I'm still missing over 1300 songs, but I have recovered thousands. I've got almost 40 days worth of music & this has been driving me insane! Thanks for posting the video!!! Now if I can just find the rest!!!🙂

The problem with that analogy is that the Apple Store is also selling you the shelving to store your CD's on. When the shelving collapses and destroys the CD's you purchased what is your recourse?

I have taken to copying all of my media to an external before using an internal copy to sync with my phone just because of reasons like this. I have had nothing but difficulty in utilizing my phone when my company forced me from another platform that integrated well with Windows. I'm sure some here will say that is the problem but I won't be making PC changes anytime soon for work and I'm talking to IT now about making Android an option for all of us.

I searched so many sites for an answer to my problems around why music that I had purchased wasn't accessible on my iPhone. This response from Don Eccles finally helped me identify the issue - I luckily had a back-up of all my previous music purchased and could then, using his advice, link each individual song on iTunes library which wouldn't play and wouldn't transfer to iPhone, to the songs in the back-up folder. Thanks much !!!

I have went to the preferences/advanced after reading all of this and I cannot locate where my music truly is. Ive looked for the name and I cant find it ive looked for the info iTunes gives for it and I cant locate it anywhere...Please help 😟 running on a PC and every song of mine has a ! next to it. It was on my computer last i was on it. Which was about a year ago. But i havent done anything to it to make it disapear. There is a random file that says Previous Itunes Librairies. And I thought i found where the location was but it was some folder that linked me to online with alllllllll of this code stuff... I have no idea what Im doing and i need help!! the link thing it gave me was C:\Users\Raven Malone\Music\iTunes\iTunes Music Library.xml

You are truly the King Solo. I had the same problem when I migrated library from old computer... I did the manual matching process for a dozen songs and decided this was insane. Thanks to your instructions, I am now enjoying my music library!

I have this problem too. Did you ever get an answer?

Thank you so much. Mine is up and working now because of you.

Great! Any way you can give me the green up arrow for some points for helping solve that issue for you? I would love to have a point! LOL! If ya feel like it, of course. 😁