How do you transfer iTunes/playlists from PC to Mac?

Question

I have a PC and my iTunes library has 15,000ish MP3's and over 100 playlists.  Even though my iTunes is located on my PC, the music is stored on an external hard drive.  Im thinking of buying a Macbook.  Ive spent hours upon hours preparing playlists over the years and need to know if you can transfer iTunes and the playlists?  I wont make them all over and it will be a deal breaker for buying a Mac if I have to make these playlists all over.  Last year someone at Apple store said they could do it for like $70. Really?  Im gonna pay $2500 for a Mac and you waanna charge me $70 more?  No Way!  Please help.
Thanks

Answer 1

You can transfer by copying the entire iTunes folder and all the files and folders it contains to the other computer.  If you have an empty library on the new computer you can just copy the moved folder over the empty one and start iTunes.  Alternatively, put it in another location and start iTunes with the option key held down and point it to the new library location.
A problem you may incur is your external drive.  If it is formatted NTFS for use with PC you may find your Mac can read files on it but not write files to it.  THe best solutiuon will be to reformat it for use with a Mac but this will entail erasing all files in the process so you will need to store them elsewhere when reformatting.  You will need to name the newly formatted drive with the exact same name as the old drive.  If you didn't format it to NTFS but used FAT32 formatting, that will work with a Mac too, but most PCs will format to NTFS.