Can I split my itunes music library between and internal and external hard drive?

Is it possible to have music on the two different drives and still be able to make playlists from both drives to put on my ipod?  Here's my situation:  I'm using a Dell 32 bit computer running Vista Home Premium SP2 which I share with other users.  I have a large itunes library (40g+ of music only) that's starting to hog the hard disk space from other users. If possible, I would like to split off part of my itunes library to an external hard drive while still having access to the entire library for my ipod. Ideally I would like to have all my downloaded songs on both the internal and external drives so I'll have backups in case a drive fails, while putting all the music I have hard copies of solely on the external drive. Any help on how this can be done would be appreciated.

If you manually manage your itues library, you can store parts of it on an external drive, or on an internal drive.  Just keep in mind that in iTunes that you must set a default location for iTunes to manage it's files, and that will be the default location for iTunes to store anything it downloads.  You would need to manuay manage moving things from there if tht is not where you want them stored.
Perhaps a "better" solution would be for you to invest a little mone into 2 external drives.  One to hold your entire iTunes library, and the second to be your off-line backup of the first.  This is the method I have gone with and I like how it works for me.  My entire iTunes library is on an external (portable) 320GB drive.  Then, when iTunes is not running, I will clone my external drive onto a second drive I happen to have, this way if I have any failure of my primary drive, I lose at most about a weeks worth of content.  For me, I purchase little content during a week, but I do move a fairly large volume of podcasts.  With the entire library being on the external drive, if I ever have to swap to using my backup drive iTunes wil just think that it hasn't run and downloaded anything for a week, and all the "lost" content will be re-downloaded automatically.  This won't work for apps or purchased content, but for subscribed podcasts, it is great.

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