How do I restore a backed up music library from another drive

I have had to move many thousands of music tracks from an old MacPro  to a new Mac Mini.  I transfered the whole music folder to a NAS before I did this and while the MacMini seems to have setup an iTunes library with some of the music a lot is not appearing. I have bought some more tracks and backed up CDs since this move onto the new libaray but now I want to restore all the missing tracks which are sitting on the NAS. How do I do this without ending up with hundreds of multiple copies of the tracks taht are on the Mini??? The Organise Library tool might copy the tracks across but it'll almost certainly make duplicates of exisiting tracks...
I have iTunes Sweeper but I don't think its capable of this. Is there an App that will?

This is what I always do (and believe me, it's been done many times):
1. Quit iTunes.
2. Locate the current iTunes library (this assumes that you have used iTunes since your old lib got damaged). You can use find to do this, the current lib will be the one that's been modified last (so if you last used iTunes on September 22nd and quit afterwards, the library should show that it's been modified 22/9).
3. It'll probably be named just as 'iTunes library.xxx' (can't remember the file ending now). Now, back up the backed up library (you can never be too sure) and when done, change its name to be identical to your current, pathetically small library.
4. Move the old library to the folder where the new one is. The system will ask whether you want to replace the the existing library with the same name, and of course you will want to.
5. Start iTunes anew and you should have your old library back.

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