Most things are easier than they firstly seem: in order to free some space on my hard disk I had the glorious idea to move parts of my iTunes library to an external hard disk. Instead of using a third party program like Libra or iTunes Library Manager I found and followed this hint: hold down the option key while starting iTunes 7 and choose to create a new library.
In my old library I created a playlist containing all songs I wanted to have backed up, e.g. a smart playlist with all songs added before 24 months. Then I exported this playlist as XML, started iTunes with the new library and re-imported the playlist again. iTunes copied each song of the playlist by itself to its folder structure on the external drive. To avoid double entries and have two complementary libraries, I wiped the listed songs out of my original iTunes library.
Pretty straightforward, you just have to know the option key trick. It lets you create new iTunes libraries and switch between them during start-up. iPhoto works pretty much the same way, so I cleaned up that library as well and some more urgently needed disk space on my internal hard drive.
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