If you're an iTunes user whose appetite for music, movies, and podcasts is outstripping the capacity of your computer, it might be a good time to think about offloading that library to an external hard drive or a separate internal drive. If you do it right, the process is relatively simple, although the transfer time could take an hour or more depending on the size of your collection.

To walk you through it, here's a step-by-step guide on how to move your iTunes library to an external hard drive.

Step 1: Preparation

Connect the hard drive that will serve as the new home for your iTunes library. Make sure the drive is recognized by your computer and has enough room to hold your collection. To gauge the size of your media library, open iTunes, select one of your libraries (music, movies, TV shows, podcasts, audio books, etc.) from the left pane, and take a look at the numbers written at the bottom-center of the iTunes window. You should see the number of files in that particular library, along with the size of the library, measured in gigabytes.

Moving your iTunes library means moving all of your media (audio and video), so be sure to check the size of each of these libraries to get an accurate picture of how much space you'll need.

While you're going through your collection, it's not a bad idea to do some spring cleaning while you're at it. Deleting old podcasts and TV shows you never plan on watching again can shave whole gigabytes from your library and hours from your transfer time.

Step 2: Define a new location

Once you've confirmed that your destination hard drive is up to the task of hosting your iTunes library, it's time to open your iTunes preferences. On a PC, you'll find these preferences under the iTunes Edit menu. For Mac, preferences live under the iTunes menu. With the preferences pane open, click under the advanced tab and where it says "iTunes music folder location" change the location to a desired folder on your external hard drive.

Step 3: Make iTunes copy new files

Before hitting the OK button, also make sure the "Copy files to iTunes Music folder when adding to library" option is checked. This ensures that any new content you download or rip into iTunes gets transferred to the new location. After that, you're all clear to hit OK.

This story first appeared in CNET's MP3 Insider blog

Tags: Library, TV, audio book, CNET Networks Inc., hard drive