Moving iTunes Libraries from one place to another

Being a self-proclaimed geek and iPod aficionado, I am constantly fighting the battle of hard drive space on my laptop. My machine has an 80GB hard drive, which I always thought was a lot, until I started loading iTunes music up on it--and at 30GB, my iTunes library is eating up about half of my hard drive space!

I do have an external 160GB drive, and the thought occurred to me the other day that it would be great to be able to move my iTunes music from my primary laptop drive to my external drive. I am a bit gun shy about the concept, however, as I have literally spent scores of hours rating and classifying my music library, and I don't want to lose all of that metadata.

So...after some research, I discovered how to easily move all of your music from one place to another, while retaining all of that valuable metadata (these instructions were made for Windows, but I believe they apply to the Mac as well):

1. Create a directory on the drive where you wish to move your music library
2. Start iTunes
3. Go to Edit...Preferences
4. Select the 'Advanced' tab
5. Ensure that the 'Keep iTunes Music folder organized' box is ticked
6. Hit the 'Change' button and navigate to the new drive/directory
7. Hit 'OK'
8. From the main iTunes directory, select 'Advanced....Consolidate Music Library'

At this point, iTunes will copy all of your music from the old location to the new, retaining all of your playlists, ratings, etc. Pretty slick!