Managing music and iTunes from an external hard drive

I have a large quantity of music that I have downloaded to an external hard drive. I used Windows Media to download the music to the hard drive. What I want to do is keep my music and photos on the hard drive but be able to access the files from my laptop (Mac Book Pro). I don't want to take up the hard disc space on the laptop, so how do I make sure that all future cd's imported go the the hard drive (and not necessarily to the "iTunes" folder), are stored as the individual cd/artist name, and are then easily retrieved by iTunes for burning?
Scott

Niel,
You've got me most of the way there! I redirected the iTunes Music Folder location to the external hard drive, and specified the folder on the hard drive that includes all the previously ripped/downloaded music. Then I did the "consolidate library" command, which was successful in putting the minimal music already in my iTunes library onto the external hard drive. Finally, to get all the music from my external hard drive into the Library, I deselected the "copy files to the iTunes music folder when adding to the library" and then "add to library" the folder that is on the hard drive containing all the music I want to be able to browse and select to put on my iPod. Unfortunately, only some of the music came across. It copied about 20 gigs of the music, of which there is 135 gigs of music to copy...???
All I'm trying to do here is maintain a large volume of music (and eventually photos) on an external hard drive, and be able to use iTunes to access the music for placement on my iPod. What have I missed in my implementation here?
Many thanks for you kind advice and help! Scott

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