Help with iTunes Library and External Music Management

Okay, this nightmare has been getting worse and worse over the past few weeks so let's break it down so people can understand what I'm trying to do.
1) I have music on both my internal laptop drive and external drives.
2) I want to have two libraries, one for the internal drive featuring all the music on my internal drive (and possibly some stuff on the external since that's how it currently is), and the other which is ALL my music from all my drives.
3) I want all new podcasts/itunes store content to save to my external drive.
4) I want the iTunes music folder to reflect which library I'm running (that is to say, if I am in my internal library, the iTunes music folder would be on the internal drive so if anything is copied to "itunes music library" it would copy to my internal, if on the external drive the itunes folder would be on the external drive and anything copied would end up there)
5) I want iTunes to keep each library organized.
6) for my External library I would LOVE to keep all my playlists, and iTunes store purchases in the library (something that didn't happen when I created a new library)
IS THIS POSSIBLE!?!
Basically here's what i did in the past. created a new library on the external and added all my music on the external to it. this caused it to organize everything fairly nicely. I then copied imported the XML data from my old internal library so I would get my playlists and iTunes store stuff to show up, along with anything on the internal drive. this cause MAJOR duplication issues (i have 3 copies of songs now in my external drive which Im going to have to sort through). I tried multiple libraries but everytime I switch back and forth my iTunes music folder keeps changing. (ie. the folder location will carry over to any library - not stick to just the one) This is a HUGE pain in the ###.
Basically, if I'm on the road I want to be able to open iTunes, it automatically launch my internal library which has everything in my internal drive, know that the music folder is "my username/music", and then when I come back home and able to plug into my external drive be able to launch that external library and it know that my music folder should now be "externaldrive/music".
i cannot seem to get iTunes to save this folder preference PER library. is this even possible!?! I just want this stupid thing to work!
Message was edited by: ehmjay

As long as you don't have an existing library that is synced with a device or holds oodles of carefully crafted playlists, ratings etc. then...
Hold down shift as you start iTunes. You should get an option to choose or create a library. Click create, browse to root of the external drive and click save so that your library is say X:\iTunes where X: is the letter of your external drive. All new content downloaded to the library will stay on the external drive.
See this user tip for a backup strategy.
tt2

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