ITunes For Mac :: Move Media And Libraries To External Hard Drive / When Keep Organized Deselected

step by step directions for moving the actual media ‘files’, ie the mp3s, as well as the necessary library files, to an external drive, when ‘keep media organized’ and ‘copy files to media folder’ are NOT SELECTED?I am running OS X 10.6.8 and iTunes 10 [and prefer a solution which does not require updating software. I prefer to maintain my own customized  folder and file structure for my mp3s; and have therefore deselected

1] Keep iTUnes Media folder organized  and 2] Copy files to iTunes Media folder when adding to library. All the directions in the various posts seem to require selecting these options.  Is this critical for success?

From the many posts I have read, it seems there’s more to it than just drag and drop, that I need to ensure that iTunes is ‘pointed’ to somewhere? Not the mp3s themselves, but to a ‘library” [is that yet another copy of the mp3s? somewhere on my hard drive?].

Additionally, over the years I have moved about 45GB of mp3s to ‘storage’ external hard drives to create more space on my laptop. Not ideal interim solution.  I am again low on space and have decided to buy new external drive for holding all of my mp3s, ie the 45 GB in ‘storage’ and the remaining 75 GB from my laptop.  Ideally, I would like to also keep all my artwork, playlists and ratings and the like [which I guess are in the ‘libraries’???]

Am I correct, that I will need to also move to the new external hard drive that folder which holds the .itl and .xml files and which is named ‘iTunes’???  and then there is another step to link the ‘media’ to the ‘library’ to ‘itunes’?