Rhythmbox and Playlists

[Hubertus Hiden]

I have a few thousand songs on my notebook and several thousand others 
on a external harddisk. My problem is that when I start rhythmbox 
without the external HD it takes quite a long time to move the (now 
missing) HD contents to "missing titles". And the same vice versa when 
plugging the HD in. That process takes about 15 minutes for my 70000 titles.
Does anybody know if rhythmbox can be tweaked somehow to better handle 
that situation? Or is there some other player around that behaves in 
such a way by default ?

Many thanks,
Hubertus

Thinkpad T61 running Ubuntu Hardy 8.04 LTS