iTunes "The song could not be used because the original file could not be found. Would you like to locate it?" Fix

Because I wanted to upgrade to SP1 on my Vista x64 PC and was having problems doing the normal upgrade, I had to wipe out the drive and re-install from scratch. That was several months ago and since then I haven't sync'ed my iPod touch because I haven't installed iTunes. So finally today I decided to spend the time and do it. After I installed the newest version of iTunes and plugged in my iPod to the computer via USB, I got the message:

"The iPod is synced with another iTunes library. Do you want to erase this iPod and sync with this iTunes library?"

Now I had made a backup of my original user folder on my old Vista install. So I proceeded to shutdown iTunes, rename the folder:

C:\Users\MY_USER_NAME\Music\iTunes

to

C:\Users\MY_USER_NAME\Music\iTunes_bak
as backup.

Then I copied the backup iTunes folder with the xml file inside to C:\Users\MY_USER_NAME\Music\.

Upon launching iTunes again I was pleased to see the iPod being synced. But when I tried to click on a song to play it in iTunes I got the error message:

"The song could not be used because the original file could not be found. Would you like to locate it?"

This is because I had moved the mp3 folder to another hard drive since my new Vista install. I didn't want to manually go through all the songs and re-locate them within iTunes. So I took a look at the "iTunes Music Library.xml" file under C:\Users\MY_USER_NAME\Music\iTunes and noticed that the drive letter for each song were coded inside the file.

So I made a backup of the xml file, then opened it under notepad, and did a search and replace for "OLD_DRIVE_LETTER:/" to "NEW_DRIVE_LETTER:/" and saved the file. I ran iTunes but it actually rebuilds the xml file, apparently from "iTunes Library.itl". So this time I renamed "iTunes Library.itl" to "iTunes Library.itl.bak" as backup, and then created a blank text file when I then renamed to "iTunes Library.itl". And then I did the search and replace again, this time saving the file as "iTunes Music Library.xml.good".

Upon launching iTunes it gave a message that the library file is damaged and renamed to "iTunes Library (Damaged).itl". The music libary is shown as blank. I then went to File, Library, Import Playlist, and selected the "iTunes Music Library.xml.good" file. And aftering importing, voila!, everything worked like a charm!

Hope this help those of you out there running iTunes on Windows and have recently physically moved your music/mp3 folder. And be sure to backup your iTunes libary just in case- don't move your original iTunes libary folder but instead make a copy it.