Windows 7: How to successfully recover music files?

Recently the external HD with my complete iTunes library crashed and could not be repaired/accessed. Fortunately one of my children had a copy of it - but had deleted a substantial amount of classical music that did not interest him.
But after the deletion his HD had only been used to play the songs, nothing was added or edited, so I thought it would be easy to undelete or recover 'my lost music'.
My first disappointment was that the good old UNDELETE command in MS-DOS no longer seems to work in Windows 7. Correct?
I found Windows 7 information that deleted files can be recovered with the 'previous versions' option, but for my music no previous version could be found. Or did I look the wrong way?
Then I used three different file recovery systems: minitools data recovery, file recover, recover my files.
All three found tons of files (90% the same ones), but hardly any usable music. Most was crap - and you can only find out by testing each individual file.
First of all, the files names were often not the songtitles, but something like $BN76GTP4A. If a property field contains a song title and/or artist name and/or duration, it is often the incorrect one. The file itself too is often crap: it starts in the middle of a song, then after 10 seconds switches to a complete different piece of music - and so on. Unpredictable result.
I always thought that recovering/undeleting data from a 'non-affected' HD was easy as drinking a cup of tea. Apparently not.
Where are the days that it was enough to run MS-Dos > Undelete and find ALL deleted files complete and unharmed, with only the first file name letter replaced by _ or $. Those days seem gone. Why?
Is there still a similar recovering method available that brings my music back?
Thanks for your suggestions.

Did you consider using a HD recovery $ervice for the external HD?

Yes - but far from attractive: prices from US$ 300-600 plus additional DHL shipment costs to and back (Indonesia <> Singapore).
Apart from that: I still do not understand why fancy uptodate software recovery programs can do no better than just produce crap, while the good old MS-DOS undelete command brought back all files instantly and undamaged...
Can anyone explain?
Has anyone an application/suggestion that does the same as what in the past 'undelete' did?

Use Recover.

Recovering files from an external disk is usually not easy. The "previous version" only works if you have arranged for restore points on that disk/partition which you probably have not done.

Maybe this can help: Data Recovery for Dummies: simple way to rescue your files

There are several kinds of data recovery issues I can think of.

1- Deleted files and the HD has not been over written with other files.
2- Deleted and damaged files on a HD that has been written to.
3- Deleted and damaged files on a physically sound HD with a damaged partition table
4- Deleted and damaged files on a physically damaged HD

There are some sophisticated programmes and other techniques for dealing with issues 2, 3 and 4.

However this issue seems to fall into caegory 1 as you have a good second copy of the files on a good HD which have just been deleted, so recuver should do the trick quickly and easily, and its free!

Recuva - Undelete, Unerase, File and Disk Recovery - Free Download

Kind Regards

Chris