Well, the thing is, I'm a music pirate at heart, so I've been using my external as a go-between to rip people's entire libraries at once. So I kind of need the NTFS since most people run Windows, but at the same time it makes using it difficult in Linux.
So I'm looking at some of those programs to make NTFS work a little better with Linux. Thanks for the links, by the way--and yes, Kaniaz, amaroK is super awesome. I lurve it.