Have a lot of music... Any way to keep it off my hard drive yet use it?

Question

Hi all!
I am quite new to the mac family, and am just getting my computer set up to my liking. I was wondering if it would be possible for me to keep my 12,000 songs on my external hard drive and use them from there, instead of putting them onto my relatively small (compared to my external hard drive) 250GB hard drive on my mac. When i used to use windows, whether I wanted it this way or not, It would "copy" all the files into itunes, but they wouldn't actually be stored there. Only the names would appear, and I would still have to plug in the ext. hard drive if i actually wanted to play the files. is there anything like this for mac?
also, since I have so much music, and download music so often and in large amounts, I was wondering if anyone has any recommendations on how to keep an organized music file, and a way of downloading and putting them into itunes so that I can actually keep track of all the music?
Any help will be greatly appreciated!
Thanks to all.
Best,
Alex

Answer 1

Asherr130 wrote:
so basically, I have all this music on my computer already, and I've been trying to go through it to cut it down to only the things I want.... can I drag those files directly from itunes to a hard drive
yes. i would ALWAYS let iTunes do the moving lest it loses track of where the files are stored.
follow the instructions in this link to move your iTunes library to an external HD. the article is for Mac. if your music is still on the windows machine, check this read for pointers: http://lifehacker.com/242468/geek-to-live--how-to-move-an-itunes-library-from-a- pc-to-mac-and-back.
also, when I've done that, and have everything on the external hard drive, I can go clean up all the music files still left on my computer.... then I press option and drag everything back to itunes? what will that do for me?
as i mentioned, this will make iTunes reference the path to the original location (your external HD) but will not copy the files physically.
and how will I be able to work with my music and update it after that?
you mount the external HD before launching iTunes. now you can do whatever as if the files where on your startup disk.