How to play music in itunes from external drive without copying files

Everytime I go to play a song in itunes, it imports it first. I am a DJ and don't want 200 gigs of music on my HD. There has to be some way to just play all of my songs off of my external HD w/o itunes importing the songs.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you very much for your help. This is my first Mac and I am getting use to how it operates. SInce I have gotten It, I usually just click on the song from my external then itunes imports it then plays it.
I use Serato when DJing which allows me to just access my external and play from there, which is what you suggested doing by creating a itunes library on my external.
I will create a library on my external and do like you suggested. That seems like it would solve all of my problems. I am using the instructions from here: http://www.apple.com/support/itunes/ to do it. Seems like it should be pretty straight forward.
Again, thank you for your help.

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