Need some adivce using an external with microstudio

[degsinger2007]

I am new to microstudio and I use an external hard drive where my karaoke songs are in mp3+g zipped format. When I use microstudio to pull up that drive it finds them just fine. The problem: It takes forever for the 3000 songs I have to load into microstudio. Is there a better, quicker way to access these in microstudio. I don't want to get to my show over an hour earlier just to load these.
I use a laptop with Vista Home Premium software and have the latest release of microstudio. Any help from you would be greately appreciated. Thanks!!