This question might be more suited to a technical forum but I'll ask it here anyway.

I lost a lot of stuff when my laptop died and I only had time to back-up a few things. My iTunes library file was one of those things. I lost everything else related to my iTunes. I've got my laptop back fixed and I've managed to rip everything from my iPhone onto my laptop so I've got back about 50% of everything I lost from my laptop. I installed iTunes again and replaced the new library files with the ones I'd backed up. Obviously all the songs, videos and apps are coming up missing but they still have all the old information like play counts, playlists etc.

Is there an easy way to get iTunes to find all the files again? At the moment I'm just having to do it song by song and I have about 2,500 songs I want re-added. I really don't want to start fresh, especially since my iTunes library goes as far back as 2005.

There is a way to do it - it happened to me a while back. Can you put the files back in a folder marked at the original location? So say you had your iTunes files all in c:/My Music/iTunes/My Library and then filed in Artist folders, if you put them back there and they're ripped at the same quality, the old file extensions will still work.

Yeah I can do that but it'd probably take me just as long. I've gone through 2 desktop computers and 2 laptops since I started my iTunes library and that's how I've done it when moving stuff across before. Unfortunately when I ripped stuff from my iPhone it was all named differently (e.g. the original song on my old laptop might be '01 Bad Romance' whereas the new copy is '1 - Bad Romance') so I'd have to go round renaming all the song files and song folders.

Think I'm just going to have to face starting over unfortunately.

I'm with you - that likely would mean identifying each song individually again then and you're probably better off just adding your library together album by album again unfortunately.

You really should invest in their iCloud system - all your stuff will be backed up to their servers then (even if it's not originally purchased on iTunes) and can be restored via a single click even if your hard drives, iDevices and so on all go t*ts up. It costs about 18 quid a year I believe.