Using a Hard Drive like an iPod? Portable library?

[dizastor]

This may be a foolish question but I was wondering if anyone knew if there was a way to use a regualr hard disk as a portable music library.

My problem is this, I would like to bring some music to work to listen to, but they have a DO NOT D/L MP3s to the hard disk policy. I have a 40gig portable hard drive that I could load up with music, but if I try to play the songs at work I'm thinking it's just going to copy all of my tunes to the Work computer in the iTunes folder.

So my question is this... is there any software out there that would make my work iTunes think that my hard disk was an ipod or a portable music player of some sort so that I don't have to copy everything to my work machine?

Any help/software or workaroud would be appreciated.
Thanks

[brap]

...Any help/software or workaroud would be appreciated.
Thanks

All you need to do is uncheck "Copy files to iTunes music folder when adding to library" in Edit>Preferences>Advanced (assuming your work box is a PC).

[PlaceofDis]

i think that you can have your iTunes library on an external harddrive if thats what you are thinking of useing, just set that up as your library instread of the harddrive on the computer

or here is my idea if you have an iPod. Just use that to play music, but this depends on what type of speakers you have. You could either use the headphone jack or the dock's line out (i like the dock idea because then you could also use it to keep the pod charged.

just my $.02

[dizastor]

I didn't realize that there was the option to not copy to the hard drive. Sweet. I guess I should have investigated more.

I used to own the orginal 5gb iPod but I sold it on eBay when I started having trouble with battery life and firewire connector, I like the way the iPod just gets adds all of it's playlists and music to your playlist automatically when it is plugged in without copying tunes, I think that is what I was looking for, but until I find that solution i suppose I will use a workaround.

And no, my work machine is a Mac. Lucky me.