Problems moving library from pc to mac via external drive

Hi, I have searched hi&lo for an answer to my problem, and now I'm having another problem. I have just got a macbook and had all my music on an external drive in WMA format. I dragged my library into itunes on a pc to transfer it all to mp3 format so I could play it on my mac. That took some time (I have about 50GB worth of music) but it worked. Why can't I just save and replace the old wma library with the new mp3 library? Or do I have to save the new one and then delete the old one? I have just spent hours organizing all the files and artwork, etc. So in order to save the itunes music folder and copy it to the external drive I must consolidate, right? Now the new problem. When I click consolidate library I get an error "Coping Music failed: filename was invalid or too long." I have plenty of space on the pc cdrive and on the external drive. I have done export library and it just puts a small xml file there that obviously isn't 50gb of music! The itunes folder looks like it has most files in it, but no artwork, etc? I have read about the find&replace (can't figure that out either) and other articles, but nothing is working for me yet, any help would be greatly appreciated as I have been at this for days and am getting really frustrated. This is my first mac and use of itunes and I don't see why it's so difficult to transfer your music over! Please help!

This page may be of some help: How to move an iTunes library from a PC to Mac (and back)

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