Who It's For: Anyone who's frustrated with iTunes putting little exclamation points next to songs that it won't play...and then asking you to locate the track.

Requirements: iTunes; music that iTunes cannot find.

Summary: If you reorganize the music on your hard drive--say, by moving it onto an external hard drive, switching up your folders, or renaming your drives--Apple's otherwise helpful iTunes software will lose sight of your tracks and will never play them again. That is, unless you follow the steps in this tutorial. One caveat: This tutorial will call for you to erase all your song ratings and playcounts. However, your songs themselves won't be erased.

1. Start iTunes

This should go without saying, but you never know. Start iTunes now.

2. Click "Library"

Click one of the songs in your collection, and then press Ctrl + A to select your entire library.

3. Select all songs

Click one of the songs in your collection, and then press Ctrl + A to select your entire library.

4. Clear songs

Right-click anywhere in the selected songs area, and choose Clear from the popup menu.

5. Big decision time

As mentioned above, following the steps in this tutorial will remove all your song ratings and playcounts. If you don't know what those are, then you don't need to worry about them. If you do know what they are, this is your last chance to decide whether you want to discard them. I say it's worth it, because you'll keep all your music, and re-rating songs is less of a pain than helping iTunes find every song you've moved around on your computer.

6. Fear not, young warrior

Although it looks like iTunes is about to delete all your music, it really isn't. See the next step for more on that.

7. Do not recycle your music

iTunes might ask you if you want to send music in your iTunes folder to the recycle bin. Do not select this option, unless you're trying to trash your whole digital music collection. If you do select it by mistake, try to close down iTunes before it completes its ominous task, or else just grab your music from the recycle bin after iTunes finishes putting it there.

8. Add your music back into iTunes

Now point iTunes toward the folder(s) that contain(s) your music. Default to the highest-level folder, since iTunes will grab songs from subfolders as well. Rinse and repeat until you've imported all your music into iTunes. Now you won't have those annoying exclamation points telling you to help iTunes locate songs. If you listen on random mode, you're likely to hear songs you haven't heard in a while because iTunes has been skipping them. Now it's all good.