Itunes music on external drive - how to get it back onto mac.

hi - some time ago I transferred my growing itunes library to an external hard drive. The database remained on the mac. My mac was an old powerpc imac. So far no problem. Things moved on and I have just bought a new imac i3 etc. I would now like to transfer my itunes content to the new mac as it has loads of space. Alternatively I would be happy to keep the music on the external drive. I transferred the contents of the old mac to the new mac without any difficulty. The database on itunes arrived seemlessly on the new mac. I plugged in the external hard drive and nothing worked. I had forgotten that the old mac was power pc and the new mac was of course intel.
My question is now, how do I get the library on the external drive back onto my old mac so that I can transfer it to the new mac? Any ideas. I am sure it is simple, but am not the best on computers. I can follow instructions.

mdockrell wrote:
will make sure both machine are running the same version and try again
again, the version shouldn't matter - the worst that could happen is that the newer version would need to update the library (which may take a while).
if you still have access the the PPC, try copying its iTunes folder once more to the intel. you can use a thumb drive or connect the two Macs with a firewire cable, boot the source Mac in _*Target Disk Mode*_, and copy the entire iTunes folder from <MacintoshHD>/users/<yourname>/music on the source to <MacintoshHD>/users/<yourname>/music on the target (overwriting the iTunes folder in place there).
connect the external to the intel and wait for it to mount, then launch iTunes.
what happens ?

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