I use Limewire with a Mac OS X and I download a lot of songs. At one point it told me that my harddrive was running out of space, so I switched from Shared to a custom folder on my desktop for file storage. Soon, certain songs on ITunes started disappearing. I would see an icon to the left that looked like an exclaimation point and if I clicked on the song it would say "The song (insert name here) could not be used because the original file could not be found" and asks if I would like to locate it. I used to be able to find the songs somewhere else but now they seem to have been erased off the harddrive. It seems as if every time I download another song or movie, 5 or move randomized songs disappear. I'm really confused here: I'm about to get an iPod Video and I would hate for all my favorite songs to be gone. I've already had to delete a lot of songs because they apparently disappeared from the harddrive. PLEASE help!

I've had a similar problem with my external drive which is where I keep my iTunes library. I'm still not sure whether the drive or iTunes is to blame. I posted at the iTunes forum about it. I think you should too ... the more noise we make ... iPod Forum & check the index for iTunes on Mac. BTW sorry for the late reply but I posted on that forum because I wanted to get an answer also. But nobody was aware of exactly why. I think I received about 3 suggestions why this might have happened.

BTW you are talking about the iTunes Music Library aren't you? And not the LW playlist that appears in iTunes. If you're refering to the LW playlist in iTunes then the answer is because your songs in the LW playlist reflect your LW download folder (shared folder.) Since you changed the location of the downld folder & probably didn't move the files from the old location to the new one, then iTunes can't find them in the location the LW playlist would look for them. I don't use the LW playlist function in iTunes. I simply make sure all files are properly added to the iTunes music folder which I do manually. That way I don't need to keep my external drive connected the whole time I'm using LW.