digital hell

I have been struggling with deleting the dead tracks in iTunes after my disc failure. This morning after reading through various forums and the like I deleted all the music from my iTunes library. This was nerve wrecking stuff. I only deleted the reference to the music files, and the idea is that the file itself should still be accessible. I then re-imported all the music in the iTunes folder. The good news is that it worked. All the dead tracks are gone. The bad news is that I now know the full extent of the damage. I have lost 2620 tracks in total. The very strange, and really annoying, thing is that the tracks are missing across a range of albums, one track from this one, two tracks from that one. I'm in two minds about deleting the lot and start again. I made some mistakes with the cataloguing system that I used in the beginning, including deleting all the album track numbers in a moment of madness. Something that I have been gradually repairing over the last year or so. There is something very attractive about the idea of having it all set up in exactly the way I want. I have even been debating with myself about whether I should have imported the tracks in AAC@160 kbps rather than 128kbps. The quality of the music at 128kbps is absolutely fine to my ears, but the quality does deteriorate slightly when I burn music to disc. To rebuild the library to it's current level would probably take around a year. Decisions. Decisions. What is a boy to do?