How to access music on external hard drive?

Hi, I picked up my new iMac yesterday and am stuck! I have an external hard drive that has stacks of music, movies etc on it. I was hoping to be able to plug it into my iMac and iTunes would find it all, but that doesn't seem to work.
The music was ripped onto the hard drive using a Windows PC - is that the root of my problem and is there a simple way of getting around it? I don't want to copy all the files onto the hard drive of my iMac because it'll take up too much room, so keeping it on my external is the preferred option.
Thanks very much
Bill

You want to leave the music on the external? Simple enough to fix.
But first, is the drive formatted NTFS? Macs cannot write to NTFS without adding a driver, such as this -> NTFS-3G
Easiest way is this...
Hold Option and launch iTunes.
Select *New library* and select the external drive.
Now there should be a new iTunes folder on the external.
Go to the external /iTunes/iTunes media/Automatically add to iTunes.
Drag all the media to this folder and iTunes will move it to teh external /iTunes/iTunes media/ in the correct folder (Movies/Music/TV Shows, etc.)

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