External to iTunes song dupe problem?

I've been trying to transfer music from my WD 250 external to iTunes on my Macbook Pro. I want to play the music through my hard drive, and not store it on my internal hard drive.

It's so n00b it's stick. I just can't figure it out. When I do try to drag n' drop it to iTunes I get doubles or even triples of every song. It's a huge PIA.

Any ideas?

Under the iTunes preferences, go to "Advanced" and then select the "General" tab.

When you are there, you should see an option to set the new iTunes music directory. Point that to the folder on your external hard drive where you want to store your music for iTunes.

Then what I did when I was facing the same task was to go to "Advanced" on the menu bar running along the top when iTunes is the active window and then select "Consolidate Libary..." which will bring your library into one location for you.

After that, you can delete the old iTunes music folder.

Would this work for 2 separate externals? I use 2 different externals for music, can I do this for both, Clint?

Thanks dude

If you want to keep music separately in more than one location, then in the same part of the iTunes preferences, untick the box saying "Copy files to iTunes Music Folder when adding to library".

This will stop iTunes from moving everything to one library and instead it will remember where it was when you imported it. You will still need to set a music folder though, as this is where imported music and such will go.

Alright dude, I've got all my 30 gigs of music playing off of my WD Mybook joint. It's really nice, and I've got no duplicates.

Lets say I wanted to plug my other hard drive in and play the other 30 gigs off that. Can I have interchangeable HD's?

Thanks a lot, Clint

You can have as many as you (and your computer) likes.