Playing iTunes library from External Drive on Macbook Pro

Here is my situation. On my home PC I have about 100GB of music. I use my Macbook Pro ALL DAY at work and have it hooked up to Klipsch 2.1 Pro Audio speakers. I currently just hook up my iPod and listen to that on Shuffle all day. However, I'm quickly getting tired of the music on there and would like access to my 100GB+ from home. I went today to Best Buy and bought the 250GB Western Digital My Book for $99 and plan to move all my music from home onto it. My question and concern here is, when I hook up the My Book and double click a track to play, is it going to automatically import into my iTunes library on my Macbook? That is what I don't want.

If that is going to happen, what are my options? Can I run a copy of iTunes on the My Book hard drive and just play it from there through my Macbook? What can I do to accomplish my goal of listening to my 100GB+ collection of music without having it on my local hard drive on my Macbook?

You can have the music on the external drive without having it on the MB (if this wasn't true I would be in a whole lotta trouble).

What you do is copy your whole iTunes folder the way it exists onto your external drive. Take the iTunes Music Library.xml file and the iTunes Library file from your music folder (should be one directory above where all of your music is located) and make a copy of them in your username\Music\iTunes\ folder on your Macbook.

In itunes preferences go to advanced, and set the location of your music library to the external drive

Thank you kind sir. I will be trying this as soon as I get home today. MUCH appreciated.

if for whatever reason trpnmonkey41's post does not make sense here is a link that should help


http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=301748

Also you can drag your iTunes library over to the external drive to make a copy, delete it on the internal drive, and put an alias (nee, symlink) to the library folder where iTunes thinks it should be and run it that way. I do that with my Mac Mini and (much larger than internal HD) external drive.

Make sure iTunes isn't running when you do this.