Lost itunes libraries when moved music to external hard drive

[JBStone]

I meant to clear some internal hard drive space by moving all my music to an external hard drive, but rather than going through iTunes and resetting the folder through the settings, I moved all my music to the portable hard drive first and deleted it out of the iTunes music folder. Now, even if I reset the path of the music, iTunes is empty. I tried putting the music back into the iTunes folder and reseting the path, but iTunes still comes up blank. How do I get my music back into iTunes?

 

[ilovebananas]

first go into itunes preferences and make sure that you have the path to your external drive entered and uncheck the "copy to itunes library...." box.
Then go to file>add to library (select your external drive) let it all import.
then go back and reheck the "copy to itunes" box. That should be it.

 

[swiftaw]

Hold down the Option key while launching iTunes. This will allow you to select your iTunes library file. Find your library file, and everything should be restored.

 

[richard.mac]

move the iTunes folder which contains the library to where your music on the external drive and then open iTunes while holding option and select that folder. make sure your external drive is set in the iTunes music folder location.

you dont have to move the iTunes library as swiftaw suggested by i just like to do it to keep things neat.