I am trying to analyze Illumina data in qiime, and I was hoping I could have some advice on how to get started. The data I received is paired-end, it has already been demultiplexed and it does not contain barcodes. I am having a hard time getting the data setup to run qiime because I do not have a barcodes file to get started. I am happy to send a couple of sample files if that would be useful.
Sounds like your files are already demultiplexed, meaning no barcode is necessary, so you can use a manifest to import those files into qiime2. Try the manifest import tutorial here and let us know if you run into any problems.
Good luck!