Managing iTunes with external drive

I just recently moved my iTunes music folder to an external drive. It's working beautifully.
It's easy enough to make sure that I have the external drive attached when listening to or importing new music from CD's. However, if I have my iTunes constantly open so that it downloads new podcasts, can I do so without always having the external plugged in and then "consolidate library" to add newly downloaded podcasts to the external?
Not sure if that makes sense, so let me clarify how I THINK this would work. If my external is plugged in, it will automatically place new podcasts in the music folder on the external. However, what happens if it downloads (or attempts to download) a podcast when the external is not plugged in (but iTunes is running)? Does it then place the podcasts on the internal drive until I later plug in the external? Then I would just have to "consolidate library" to move the newly added to the default external drive?
Sorry for such a convoluted explanation. Hopefully one of the top gurus understand what I'm trying to say. I know that I've seen it discussed and posted about before, but I can't seem to find the past posts that address this specific question.

I just do this manually because I'll end up deleting the content from the internal library anyways. You might want to check if consolidate merges content from your internal library /volumes/Macintosh HD/Users/you/Music/iTunes/ to your external library if the external library is selected when you launch iTunes. If that works, then you should be fine; however you would probably want or need to delete the files from your internal anyways. I've always considered consolidate to be a method of bringing referenced files into the library (you have songs that you imported without having the add to library checkbox selected).
I have been using an external on a machine hooked up to my HDTV for a couple of years and sometimes I need to sync items to that system from the internal or another machine (network). I just keep that library on the external selected and either transfer purchases or copy over a podcast (if I'm using sneaker net) and double click it.
For example, if I subscribe to something like GROOVELECTRIC, download a podcast, then simply double-click the actual file, it is added into my podcast directory on the external and placed in the correct location in the podcast tree.
So, if consolidate doesn't do the trick you can try just selecting the files in your library and launching them to have them copied to your external or you can try using the Add to Library function from the file menu. Figuring out a way to delete the files from the internal after merging/importing/consolidating seems to be the last piece I need to work on.
I haven't revisited this for a while, but I'd like to hear about any trick you come up with.
You will still need your internal library set up to mirror the podcast subscriptions you have on the external, so a full deletion of that library does not seem to be the solution.
Good Luck,
-j

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