my external hard drive

i have an external hard drive i use to store my music and podcasts i download form i tunes. sometimes i look in the preferences and see that i tunes has switched my storage place from the external hard drive to the hard drive on my mac. i was wondering if this was happening because i open i tunes before my external hard drive is hooked up and shows up on my desktop???

You are right it could happen because you open iTunes before you plug in the hard drive. When itunes doesn't find the directory you set it to on the external drive, it uses the default directory in the Music folder on your iternal hard drive.

~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music/

Its ok though, at any point you can use the consolidate library function under the Advanced menu in iTunes to move anything downloaded to that folder over to your external hard drive without ever having to do any manual moving. It just tells itunes to move everything to your external hard drive and reorganize it nicely.

Hope that helps.