[GoDucks]

Good morning,

I'm awaiting the arrival of m new MacBook and chose to go with a stock 60 Gig Drive and a small 100 Gig USB powered portable HD. My concern is that I have about 45 Gigs of music in my iTunes library. Is there any way to keep my iTunes Music Store purchased music and some of my other favorites on my MacBook HD while keeping the rest of my music on the external HD and to be able to see/access all of my music at once on iTunes and sync my iPod using music from both sources?

Happy to purchase a shareware program that allows this. I know I could keep everything on the external driver but would like to be able to play some music if I'm travelling and don't want to carry the external drive...

[ghporter]

You can put the music anywhere you want, and just point iTunes to it through "File|Add File to Library" or "File|Add Folder to Library." This doesn't move the files, it just adds a pointer to the files in the library database.

[GoDucks]

Perfect - thank you very much.

[icruise]

I have my iTunes music and video on two external drives. It's something that iTunes supports by default.

In addition to what ghporter said, you can also drag the music from the finder into the iTunes window. By default, iTunes is set to copy the files you drag into the library into the iTunes Music folder. You can tell if it's going to copy the files if there is a + sign on the mouse cursor when you put it over the Library. If you don't want to copy it to your iTunes Music Folder, you can hold down the option key while dragging and the + sign will disappear. In this case, only links to the files will be added to iTunes, allowing you to keep the files anywhere.

(It's also possible to turn off the automatic adding of files in the iTunes preferences. In this case, holding down the option key will do the opposite -- the files will be copied.)