iTunes Music Library location keeps on changing

Hi there - I am a recent switcher to Mac's mainly due to how much I liked using iTunes and iPod but for some reason I am having a slight problem with my iTunes Library on my Mac.

I ripped all my music to an external HD and for some reason a lot of my songs have their location set to my trash directory.... the audio and video files are actually physically on my HD so I have not lost them but its a pain to have to click on each track in iTunes and set the correct location. Does anyone know of a way to update the location of my library quickly?

I tried opening the iTunes Library XML file and doing a find a replace but as soon as I open up iTunes the locations get set back to looking in my trash. Can anyone help me out?

I'm confused about it pointing to the trash but it may be related to a sort of hidden feature. You can hook up an external drive and tell iTunes to use a folder on that drive as your default music location. But what happens when that drive isn't connected? The answer is iTunes goes back to using a folder on your fixed drive. Unfortunately, they don't expose this setting. It just happens as you mount and unmount your drive. You can see why it would be useful default behavior so that iTunes can still rip music when the external drive isn't mounted.

I'd try playing around with the default location both with and without the external drive connected and try to make the correct ones stick.

The default location when my external HDD is connected is correct and points to my external HDD. When it's not connected it points to my music folder.

There were for some reason a few albums in my trash (guess thats why they are pointing to there) but these albums are also on my external HDD.