I got a last minute call to work tonight so I just graabed my laptop and ssl (what a joy to do rather than lugging crates of vinyl) and off I went. I set up at the club and ssl was ok... I had one audio dropout during the night but it was with a file that had crashed ssl before- I just forgot about it on the night... silly me.
Anyway, the strange thing was some of my songs from itunes did not translate over to ssl. I had to search for the files using the finder and drag them into ssl to play them. This was strange because I assumed itunes playlists translate into ssl 'crates' with no problem.
When I got home I deleted the 'ssl-library' and 'databaseV2' files and relaunched ssl. Then, it could only read itunes files that were actually on my hard drive. Most of the files I play out with are on an external hard drive. Is it normal for ssl to only import files (via itunes) that it can access straight away? It would seem that I would have to delete the above files and re-read itunes library with the external drive connected everytime I play out. Is this normal behaviour?

SSL reads your iTunes library .xml file, but if half your iTunes playlist are on an external HD that means half of your playlist information is located in the xml file on your external HD and without your external HD connected Scratch LIVE wont be able to read it.