Itunes external playback issue

not sure if this question belongs in the applications section, but I have a problem/question with Itunes. I have all of my music on an external hard drive. How can I get Itunes to play the songs directly off of the external hard drive without copying every song onto my computer's hard drive?

I have done this:

1.
File > Add to Library > Selected my external hard drive to add everything on it to my library

Result: At first it says 'Adding Files: Processing...' That process takes a few minutes considering I have a lot of songs. Then it says "There is not enough room to copy all of your songs onto the Mac OSX Hard Drive, but iTunes will copy as many songs as possible." or something along those lines. So then iTunes starts copying every single song from my external hard drive onto my computer's hard drive.

2.
File > Import > Selected my external hard drive

Result: All of my songs are in hundreds of different folders for each album and artist they are in from when I imported those songs from my CDs. I cannot select my external hard drive as a whole, meaning I would have to go into each folder individually and manually (which would be ineffective and take hours) in order for the itunes library to have all of my songs.

Is there another way to do this without filling my computer's hard drive up with songs?!

Thanks for any help!

try this

How To: keep your iTunes library on an external hard drive

Similar problem

superchargedgp said:

try this

How To: keep your iTunes library on an external hard drive

Click to expand...

I went to this page and followed the steps. However, I'm having a problem.

After moving my itunes music folder to the drive, I have deleted my the folder on my macbook. I reset the location in my preferences to be the folder on my EHD. Voila. Should work. Does NOT work.

When I plug in my EHD and then launch itunes everything looks good until I try to play a song, then "!" start popping up one by one until all of my songs have them and I get 'x song could not be played because the location is unknown' (or some such) 'would you like to search for it?'

If I click 'ok' I can locate the song in the folder on my EHD and it will play, but I have to do this with each song.

I must be doing something wrong. Please help.