The original file could not be found

Hi shawnieeo,

This article may help you find the files that make up your iTunes music -

Locate and organize your iTunes files - Apple Support

Thanks for using Apple Support Communities.

Sincerely,

Brett L

The "missing file" error happens if the file is no longer where iTunes expects to find it. Possible causes are that you or some third party tool has moved, renamed or deleted the file, one of its parent folders, or the drive it lives on has had a change of drive letter. It is also possible that iTunes has changed from expecting the files to be in the pre-iTunes 9 layout to post-iTunes 9 layout, or vice-versa, and so is looking in slightly the wrong place.

Select a track with an exclamation mark, use Ctrl-I to Get Info, then click No when asked to try to locate the track. (Due to a bug in iTunes 12 you currently have to say No twice!) Look on the summary tab for the location that iTunes thinks the file should be. Now take a look around your hard drive(s). Hopefully you can locate the track in question. If a section of your library has simply been moved, a folder renamed, or a drive letter has changed, it should be possible to reverse the actions. If the difference between the two paths is an additional Music folder in one path then this is a layout issue. I can explain further if that is the case.

In some cases iTunes may be able to repair itself if you go through the same steps with Get Info but this time click Locate and browse to the lost track. It may then offer to attempt to automatically fix other broken links. Although it says something like "use the same location" it expects to find the tracks in the same artist & album layout that it generates, not all in one big folder.

If another application like Windows Media Player has moved/renamed the files then the chances are that subtle differences in naming strategies will make it hard to restore the media to the precise path that iTunes is expecting. In such cases, as long as the missing files can be found somewhere, you should be able to use my FindTracks script to reconnect them to iTunes. See this post for an explanation of how it works.

tt2

Same issue after updating iTunes to 12.2. Im usually pretty good with metadata and filenames, and had no issues with my itunes media locations until i updated and enabled iCloud Music Library (then disabled it as i noticed it was duplicating one or two random tracks by 10+ and being a bit rubbish in general). Sadly it appears somewhere along the way this has actually re-named a random bunch of my audio files by adding a "01-" (without the quotes) to the front of the file name!! I only realised this when i had located a few and started to fix the issue... In turn, iTunes has then kicked up and asked for the location of around 200 random tracks because the filenames were different, so ive just sat and manually deleted and re-added the affected audio back into iTunes. Extremely frustrating! Also, because the actual audio file has been renamed it makes it more annoying to readjust as you cant tell itunes to find everything (as the tracknames changed!)

Will be keeping iCloud Music Library off for the duration i think :/

If "music" shows up in the file path twice, how can this be corrected? here is an example of the file path....

file:///Users/removed/Music/iTunes/iTunes Media/Music/Alexi Murdoch/Time Without Consequence/08 Blue Mind.mp3

Hi,

That looks like a standard path for a missing file on a Mac. file:///Users/<Username>/Music is the default location for the iTunes folder. ../iTunes/iTunes Media/Music/<Album Artist>/<Album>/## <Name>.<Ext> is the expected location of the file within.

Where is that file really?

tt2