portable drive? yes – i do this now..
Its easier if you have a ‘music’ – then ‘itunes music’ folder to work with..
Go into itunes – edit – preferences…advanced. tick the two boxes, ‘copy music automatically’ & ‘keep music folder organized’
Choose the new location of your music – this is the ‘itunes music’. It will take 20 secs or so. Then you must go file – library – consolidate library. This basically takes all the files and puts them where you want them. Depending on the size of library this can take so time..
At the end of that, you must find the “Album Artwork” folder, as well as the iTunes Library.itl and iTunes Library.xml files and copy them to the ‘music folder’.
now itunes will be able to play the tunes and all your music is on the external drive.
does that help?