Best way to split iTunes library over Mac and external drive?

there will be others who will have better experience of this but have you thought about having a selection of tunes, higher rated, on your mac and then everything on the external? I do this for my Air (I know space is more limited) but it has worked out okay mainly because although my library gets updates a lot top rated songs are prob 1 in 10

This method works well http://www.macyourself.com/2009/04/...-your-itunes-library-across-multiple-volumes/

^
this the long way to doing it.

you could split your TV shows and Movies onto the external then add alias in there place in iTunes that point to them.

exit iTunes

copy

/Users/[Your_Username]/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music/Movies to /[EXTERNAL DRIVE/Movies

and the TV shows are at /Users/[Your_Username]/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music/TV Shows to /[EXTERNAL DRIVE/TV Shows.

select each folder on on the Eternal drive and in the finder menu select Make Alias, do this for both movies and TV Shows

copy these alias to the /Users/[Your_Username]/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music

rename Movies Alias to Movies, and TV Shows Alias to TV Shows

restart itunes, it will work as if you never changed anything, it will also copy all your new Movies and TV Shows to the external drive in the future.

you could move all your iTunes to an external drive.

I used to split TV shows and movies, but I now have a drive big enough for both.

I have a single 1.5TB drive attached via USB. I have a folder called "Movies" and a folder called "TV Shows." I just dump movies in there with whatever name I want (like I don't include "James Bond" in all the bond movies, but I do that for "Lord of the Rings"). For TV shows, I create folders for each show and then for each season. If you had Seinfeld, I would call the seasons "Seinfeld - Season 1", "Seinfeld - Season 2", etc. If you don't put the name in each folder, you might need to do a search and just see it's in the "Season 2" folder.

I have deleted all of my videos from my iTunes library (not the files, just the stuff from the library inside iTunes) and then used the Import feature to bring them in instead of clicking on every file and telling it where the new one is now located.

If you ripped stuff on your own, you'll probably need to tag it using MetaX. iTunes doesn't tag the actual file, which means you'll lose a lot of tag info if you don't use MetaX. I'm still working my way through that fun.

Power Tunes

http://www.fatcatsoftware.com/powertunes/

Not sure how well it does at handling library material that is not music. Try out the demo.