Dr. Jean's Song Store

Why is iTunes saying it cannot find the file?

Users of iTunes experience this problem at times whether they are trying to play recently downloaded songs, songs that have been on their computers for a long time, or songs that they have loaded onto their computers from a CD. The difficulty seems to be with iTunes rather than with the source of the songs.

Some of the troubleshooting files we have located and read suggest that the following may help:

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If you are using iTunes on Windows computer, just hold the Shift key while launching iTunes to bring up the library selection dialog.

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If you are using iTunes on an Apple computer, hold down the Option key while launching iTunes. iTunes should then ask you to point it to your iTunes library. Choose the directory where the library is located and iTunes should find all the songs that had exclamation points, provided that they were still in the library.

You would think that this is what the iTunes…Preferences…Advanced…General…iTunes music library location setting should do every time it opens, but apparently not.

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The above solution may work. We hope so, but we cannot guarantee that it will.

Betsy Durant struggled with this iTunes problem and persevered until she solved it. She has offered to share her experience with you. Here is what she told us:

"Thank you Alex, it worked and I saved the file....when people have this problem, instead of downloading it into a temporary file, tell them to save it to a permanent music file and name it "music file". Then when itunes comes up and says they cannot locate it, you can do a search in that music file and it will be there....it worked for me."
 
Thank you for your patience and help!"

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Here is the link where we located the info about the exclamation point:

http://mybiggestcomplaint.com/itunes-aka-the-exclamation-point/439/

Explore this page if you want to know more about what is going on with iTunes.

This link will take you to a page of references located by Google:  Reasons why iTunes cannot find a song.

Want to read more about iTunes? Check Wikipedia for general information.

Click to return to the previous page for answers to some other common questions.

If you experience any problems, using this link will result in a quick response. We are not set up to respond to phone calls. We have found that sometimes sending a second set of links to the songs will help. We can do that if you let us know.

 

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