question about moving music from external to computer

I used to just keep all my music on my computer, but then there wasn't enough space so I moved it to an external. I recently purchased a new mac capable of holding my music and tons more. I'm trying to move my music from my external to my internal on my new computer. I tried just replacing the itunes folder with the folder from the hard drive and that copied all my music to the computer, but nothing will play unless the external is connected. If I apple "i" on any of the songs with exclamation marks i can locate the song in the replaced library on the internal and then it will work.

I don't want to do this with every song, there has to be a faster way to auto find all the songs on my internal, or change the directory for all songs so that they can be found.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

If your intention is to keep the tunes on your computer, and not the external, then the best thing would be to start over, and empty iTunes as it is now, and then drag the tunes into it from the external. This will then create an iTunes music library on your computer.