ITunes Mess

I've decided that I'm going to take my music off my computer and transfer it to an external hard drive so I can free up space on my computer. Seems easy but it really isn't. It would have been easy if I had put all my music in the ITunes music folder because from there you can transfer that folder to another place and still be able to locate it but I am an idiot and put my music in a separate folder. Now I have the repetitive task of transferring all my music to the ITunes music folder and then redircting all my songs (which is going to take forever). From there I can then move the ITunes folder to the external hard drive and voila, computer space is freed up. I have googled to see if there is an easier way to do this and there is not. I have also come to the conclusion that I hate ITunes.