ITunes Library stored on external hard drive

Question

My iTunes Library is contained on an external hard drive which is in turn connected to an iMac, all of which connects to my airport network. I control the playback of the content on my Powerbook on the various airport express fed music systems in my apartment.
Is there anyway I can instruct the iTunes I use on my powerbook to always use this external drive? I currenly have to reset the library location each time I boot up (the Powerbook).
Also any music I download from iTunes store is saved to the hard drive on the powerbook (and then moved over to the hard drive manually). I'm looking for a way to sync the whole setup? I intend to change my airport extreme to the next generation and connect the hard drive to it so I'm guess this will help but is there a way around this break in the chain.
Also to keep both iTunes Library database files on both machines identical I currently copy from one to the other but this can at time cause problems in automatically recognising the location of a file, and then have to locate etc.
Any suggestion gratefully receieved.
Powerbook   Mac OS X (10.4.1)   iMac, Airport Extreme, Airport Express, LaCie Hard Drive

Answer 1

I took a second look at my settings. I do find the Music Folder on the other drive set as the location. Possibly I forgot that I've changed that too.
So, maybe you could try to set this in the preferences with a little help help from the alias in the default home folder. :-D
I could suggest an AppleScript to automatically connect to your server by setting this script-applet as default startup in you user account settings.
on run
set myUserName to "username" --enter your name here
set myPassword to "password" --enter your password here
set myServers to {¬
"afp://192.168.1.1/disk1", ¬ --set your server addresses here
"afp://192.168.1.1/disk2", ¬
"afp://192.168.1.1/disk3"}
set myServerCount to the number of items of myServers
tell application "Finder"
repeat with i from 1 to myServerCount
set thisServer to item i of myServers
repeat 5 times --i repeat this a couple of time to prevent connection drop-out
try
mount volume thisServer as user name myUserName with password myPassword
exit repeat
end try
end repeat
end repeat
end tell
end run