Keeping and importing music on external HD

I am a new Mac user as of 1 month ago and am enjoying my new MBP. I have read through many threads but have not been able to find an answer to my situation.

For years I have collected music and have copied all of my cd's into an external hard drive using windows media player. When I had my PC I was able to import to the hard drive and export music into iTunes whenever I wanted something new to listen to.

I have went through the pain of copying all of my music (over 200 GB) and reformatting the external HD to work with my new computer.

I would like to be able to continue to import to my external HD and if I choose, import that file or folder into iTunes when I want to listen to it on my iPod.

What program or programs can I use to accomplish this?

Thanks

Will this work for you ?

Transferring your iTunes Library | iLounge Article

hope this helps
clay

Clay-

Thank you. That is a great article with a ton of information. At this point I still want to keep my files controlled separately.

I look at this the same way with my photos. I have years of photos on another hard drive that I can save my pics to. The photos that I want to edit I can then import into iPhoto.

I really am just looking for something other than iTunes that will allow me to copy a CD into my external hard drive.

Happy Holidays.

Will

I had a minute so I looked around and found this. I am not sure if it will work for you but .......

Music Man Tutorial - How to rip an Audio CD to MP3 on Mac OS X using Music Man: Mac CD Ripper for Mac OS X

Clay

Another option as far as ripping your CD's onto your HDD is a free program for mac called Max. It's a great ripping program and allows you to specify the format and location of your cd rips. I use it all the time and have be satisfied with it. Cheers

I'll second Max too, Excellent and very versatile indeed.

Can you put ripped files into your iPod?

Of course 8O