How do i use itunes through an external hard drive?

i have about 10G left on my laptop's harddrive. i've been told placing itunes on an external harddrive would free up space.
i put everything on the harddrive, did the whole advanced stuff by changing the location, etc. etc. but ater all that there's still no difference on my hard drive....
what the heck?

Hi... Looks like things have got a little confused over there. Can we get a few facts straight before suggesting things that might make matters worse?
Where exactly is your active library file? If you hold down shift as you start iTunes and click the option to Choose a library, then drop down the list box at the top of the search box it should reveal the current path. E.g. mine here is at D:\iTunes and the library file is called iTunes Library.itl so my active library is D:\iTunes\iTunes Library.itl
BTW if you didn't get asked to choose or create a library you didn't do it right.
What is the current setting under Edit > Preferences > Advanced tab for the location of the iTunes Media folder? Mine is D:\iTunes\iTunes Media.
Where is the media that you've moved around? Are there copies on the internal drive and the external drive? Select a file in your library that currently plays, press CTRL-I to get info, and copy down the location of the file from the Summary tab. Repeat the process for a file with a broken link. Its path should begin file://localhost...
With all these bits of information we should have a better picture of where things currently stand. I have scripts that can be used to repair broken links, and iTunes has got better at doing it by itself, but things need to be in a sensible layout before that is worth trying.
tt2

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I'm pretty new to iTunes, so forgive me if this is a stupid question. I have about 15GB worth of music saved onto my laptop now and taking up a ton of space. So I got an 80GB external hard drive to move everything onto. What I don't understand, though, is what happens after I save my music onto the external hard drive and remove from my laptop hard drive. How do I play music in iTunes from the files stored on the external hard drive?
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A very helpful postee got to the end of his knowledge level, so I am posting this for you tech guys to sort out. Bit long because I've tried to set it out step by step. Briefly I'm new to iTunes and my laptop has a very small hard drive and is virtually full and due to be replaced. So I want to use an external hard drive.
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2.. I don't mind itunes library being on my laptop as this is just a list, but it obvoiusly has to have a pathway to the site where the actual AAC files are stored.
so surely it won't work unless the whole lot is on the external hard drive: library, extras, genius, the lot?
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5. Is this perhaps the reason why so many people report that iTunes does not recognize their external hard disk:
http://www.ehow.com/info_12199596_external-hard-drive-not-recognized-itun es.html
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Required if you've already tried other things and now have media & library scattered around. See the post make a split library portable.
in addition...
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"I haven't read the whole thread, so someone could have already mentioned this, but I did the same thing, move my music library to an external drive. The Help articles are helpful, but only up to a point. When that didn't work, I called up AppleCare support up, and they took me through all the standard steps, and got stumped at the same point I did. Finally she suggested trying something, and that ended up doing the trick. So here in brief is what you do:
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