How do you transfer music from an external hard drive into iTunes on a mac, but not write the music into the mac's internal hard drive?

I am trying to load an external library with about 700 gigs of music into iTunes on my mac, but of course my mac's inter hard drive is much less than that. Is there a way I can load the music onto iTunes without importing it into my computer? I use this hard drive for DJing so it is plugged in the majority of the time. I have iTunes 12.0.1.26 on a 2011 13" MacBook Pro.

Do you use both the internal and external drives for storing music or just the external drive?  If both, hold down the option key while dragging media to iTunes to get it to leave the media where it is and add the track location information to iTunes.  A better solution would be to relocate the entire iTunes library to the external drive and run it all from one place.  This will also make it easier to make backups of the library as you should since you are using this in a professional capacity and your livelihood depends upon it.  We can provide advice on how to do this once we know more about your setup (is there an existing library already, and where?)

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