Automatically syncing with music stored on external drive?

I most of my music on an external drive. The drive isn't always connected to the PC. Prior to iTunes 9.1 I could have iTunes automatically sync the music to my iPhone. If the external drive was disconnected iTunes would simply ignore the missing files and leave them on the phone.
With iTunes 9.1 (and 9.2) I now check the "Convert higher bit rate songs to 128 Kbps AAC" option. When I first used this I found that if I synced my phone with the external drive disconnected, it would remove all the music files from the phone that were stored on the external drive and had been converted to 128 Kbps. That was extremely annoying to say the least so I set iTunes to sync manually to prevent that from happening. I read there was a bug in the original iTunes 9.1 that caused iTunes to always try and sync 128 Kbps converted files every time which could explain why they were being deleted, but I never tried again after upgrading.
Yesterday I clicked to sync books to my iPhone, not realizing that it would wipe out all music, movies and TV from my iPhone. Again very annoying. I went to manually sync them back and noticed my Genius mixes won't sync and I read that they only sync if auto-sync is enabled.
My question is, is there an easy way to keep my music files on an external drive, automatically, sync and have them covert to 128 Kbps without having to worry about all my music being wiped off the phone if the drive is disconnected at the time iPhone syncs?

I don't believe you can do that. The convert to 128 bit only converts the songs being written to the iPod. Every time you play a song it changes (the play count goes up) so iTunes is going to go try to find those and update them every time it syncs.
I am able to disconnect my external that holds my movies and the movies remain but those are not being converted. I think that is where the problem is.
Good luck!

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Automatically syncing with music stored on external drive?

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