How to add music from external hard drive

I have been having a number of issues with my iphone lately and have had to restore it a few times. Is there an easy way of adding music directly from the external hard drive without copying to the itunes library first?

The reason I ask is because i'm using a macbook air and prefer not to have to take up a lot of space on the ssd with music. I have previously added to to itunes, copied to phone, and then deleted from itunes but its annoying to go through and i'm wondering if there is an easier way to do it? There doesnt seem to be a drag and drop option like in previous versions of Itunes.