HELP: Invisible subfolders in iTunes

[will barnes]

Hello, I hope someone here can help me out. My iTunes seems to be missing some of my music files. I can access music file A-D, but nothing else shows. If I search with the finder window though I can find the file I'm looking for, which is listed as being a subfolder under the parent folder iTunes music. If I click on it (the subfolder located with finder search) it will then appear in the iTunes Music folder. I'm using OS X 10.3 and a LaCie 250G external harddrive and iTunes 6.0.5. I had to re-install this version of iTunes after 7.1 and 7.2 failed to work well with my system. This subfolder problem existed before I reverted back to iTunes 6.0.5, but I could live with it. Now I have to reimport my music files, but if I can't see them I can't import them. I could search each one out, but there is no way I can remember all those files E-Z. Please someone help me. I'm going mad!

P.S. I've made sure I've set the library preferences correctly in iTunes, so it's not that problem. Itunes can find 4500 of my songs, I just want a quick way to find the others.

[srdill]

Will,

I am hardly an authority on iTunes, but I have been wrestling with music files all day and I came across this article which helped understand what was going on (and how I screwed up):

http://www.ilounge.com/index.php/art...new-hard-drive

Read that for starters. Then what you might want to do is to search for .m4a,
.m4p, .mp3, etc. (all your music file formats) and put a copy of everything you find in a folder. Once you have the (what sounds like) gajillion songs in one folder, do an "Add To Library" and go cook a meal for 20 of your closest friends. It may take a while. But in the end, iTunes will have a path to every song on your hard drive(s). Then, you may consider doing a "Consolidate Library" to get it all in one spot. At that point, you can clean out all the other files.

Hope that helps.