ITunes Library on an external hard drive to be used by Mac and PC

I have my music library on my PC and am willing to do whatever it takes to have it be read by both computers from the external drive. The external drive is already formatted properly so I don't need to worry about anything there.
I transferred all of the files from iTunes Media folder to the external drive and am currently loading everything into the Mac's iTunes library, but I feel like I may have missed a step along the way. As it stands, both machines are pointed to the external drive from the Preferences > Advanced tab.
What else has to be done to assured that they are both read and can be used interchangeably? Also, by doing this does the start-up time of iTunes suffer? As in it will have to load and reload the library every time my external drive is taken in or out?

And after doing this, what if I wanted to add some more songs to my library? Would I have to go through the entire process of having to rei-mport the updated library or is it just a matter of throwing them in the folder with the rest of the music?

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