Having learned one or two lessons the very hard way regarding failing iPods and crashing laptops I now have two iPod Classics and two different laptops, each with an external hard drive for the music tracks and on mp3 format - as I want exactly the same set up duplicated to avoid the painful process of losing my music and all the metadata I have added i.e. regarding the classification of each album in respect of genre, playlist etc.

As I am starting the process off anew, my question is: is it possible and/or desirable to download iTunes itself onto the external hard-drives rather on the laptops? As I understand it, the added metadata (mentioned above) resides in iTunes rather than in the music folders.

I hope that makes sense!