itunes question

Hello, I had to get the music off of my ipod using 3rd party software after my external hard drive crashed (16,000 songs). I put all of the music in a folder on my laptop, and I can see all of the music. I reinstalled iTunes, but iTunes does not recognize the music because it is in a different folder. All I get is exclamation points by the songs. I tried changing the folder in advanced settings to the folder with the music, but this still does not work. Any ideas???HELP!!Thanks