iTunes Library on External HDD?

I have just backed up all of my music, photos, documents, etc., to an external HDD (Seagate FreeAgent Pro 500GB). Have it partitioned with 350GB dedicated as an HFS+ partition, with the remaining space NTFS for old Windoze stuff. Anyway, my point: is it possible to have my mp3's/m4p's/m4a's all neatly tucked away on the external HDD, in a specific folder, and just access them from iTunes when I have the external mounted, or do I have to have the files in an iTunes library on the main Macbook volume? If I can just have them all on an external volume, and then access them when I need to, then that could potentially save me about oh, 4 or 5 gigs on the MBP. Is that possible? I hope so... if not, it will eat the aforementioned 4-5GB on the resident (internal) volume on the MBP.

Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?
Thanks in advance for the help!
Patrick

this may help answer your questions :


http://www.ilounge.com/index.php/articles/comments/moving-your-itunes-library-to-a-new-hard-drive

I have my library on an external drive. Works perfectly. If you used the search engine you'd find loads of threads with the method for doing this.

Worked like a charm! Thank you so much!

Word of caution... make sure your iPod is updated as often as possible... and, if you can, also save a copy of your iTunes library on another remote disk...

Why??

I have a G4 iBook with a 60GB HD... I also have 45GB + of music in my iTunes library, so it lives on an external HDD... or rather it has lived on FOUR external HDDs to date... my first portable drive died, so I got advice here how to copy my iPod's library to another external HDD and then managed to fool iTunes into accepting that new library as my original one, with some help from a friendly guy at a Genius bar (who probably shouldn't have helped me but did...)

Then my iPod died and I replaced that...

I also took the precaution of making a seperate back-up on a Maxtor One-Touch desktop HDD that is my safety back-up of the laptop... so the library was in three places, portable HDD, desktop HDD and iPod...

in the last three weeks, both my replacement HDD and the fail-safe Maxtor have refused to work with my iBook any more, leaving my iPod, once again, as the only carrier of my library...

I have just got yet another portable HDD and have used a programme called Music Rescue to copy it little by little onto the new portable drive...

Then, I had to tell iTunes this was the original library (again) and wipe my iPod to re-sync it with iTunes... all in all, another two days of fooling around, just to keep what I legitimately own...

Oh, and I have a new 1TB desktop drive, which I will back everything up onto - yet again...

I thought I had every avenue covered but apparently - no matter how much care you take of them - it seems to be OK for portable HDDs to just turn their toes up after about 12 months... ie when just out of warranty...

In short, back it all up !!

And then back it up again, somewhere else...

This is useful! thanks alot!