All of my music is on an external hard drive - can iTunes to recognize it

Hello and I am hoping you can help me. I have about 80 gigs of music on an external hard drive (in mp3 format). I just started using iTunes not too long ago and have just a few songs in there (located on my Mac hard drive) that I downloaded from the iTunes store.
I just connected the external drive with the 80 gigs of music on it to my Mac. I can see of the songs in Finder (when I click on the drive) so I know it's working - but I'd like to be able to have iTunes recognize all of the music without having to load all of the songs on my Mac (as 80 gigs worth of music would take up way too much space). But i don't want to loose the few songs that I currently have on my Mac hard drive either.
How do I do this?
Thanks in advance for your help!

What if you take this same topic of an external hard drive with music but instead of directly attached to the computer the music is on a Network Attached hard drive(NAS)? Will I be able to add music to my ipod without any problem? Step that up a notch, will the two computers on my network be able to recognize the music on the NAS? Will the two users be able to create their own playlists and update their ipods independently? Now step up that up one more notch, will I be able to do this with one PC running XP and my macbook with OS X?
Before I run out and buy a NAS I want to be certain. I also would like to convert my DVD library in the future and put it on the network available to an AppleTV or other UpNp media player in the future, because I love having power at my finger tips.

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