Reading MP3 music files from an external hard drive formatted for PC

Question

I have 60 Gigabytes of MP3 files (my whole CD collection, mostly saved in high quality format) on a 120 GB external hard drive that was attached to my IBM Thinkpad. They are arranged in folders and subfolders, e.g. folder "Great pianists of the XXth Century" subfolder "Sviatoslav Richter" subfolder "Sviatoslav Richter CD1" files "(01) Bach English Suites 1", "(02) Bach English Suites 2".
1) My Mac (OS X.4 - Tiger - or is that X.3?) recognizes the drive as a drive (its icon appears on the desktop), but not its contents. I was told by somebody that I'd need a differently formatted PC Hard Drive for the Mac to recognize the content, and then by somebody else that the titles would all then be truncated to 8 characters. Is there a way around this? Preferably I'd like to be able to read a HD that is formatted for PCs in the way that is now standard, directly from my Mac.
2) Is there a way for iTunes - or some other music programme for the Mac - to play the MP3s as they are currently arranged, without having to reorder or rename them, or copying my whole CD collection onto a HD from scratch? (Getting 60 Gigs of MP3s from CDs is a task I'm not keen to repeat). If necessary, I could find a way to copy the current folders and files onto an external HD formatted for the Mac, but then that would hopefully be it.
At present I'm having to use the Thinkpad with Windows Media Player to play back all this music over my Hi-Fi, but would like to free up the Thinkpad for other uses by my family, and would like to run all my music from the Mac I use for everything else.

Answer 1

Thanks, Jason & Mike. This is how I resolved the problem. Turned out the disk with the data was in NTFS format. Neither my eMac nor my wife's Carbon iMac (prehistoric, in other words) was able to read it, on repeated attempts. In process I discovered (to my surprise) that the external hard drive attached to my eMac (a 320 Gig My Book) was formatted in FAT 32 format, and that the PC laptop (Thinkpad) read from it, and wrote to it, without any problem. (Is FAT 32 less than optimal for use with a pre-Intel Mac?). So I just copied the needed files from the NTFS disk to the FAT 32 disk, via the Thinkpad. When I reconnected the FAT 32 drive to the eMac, it turned out that it was easy [with some fiddling] to put the titles of the new music into the iTunes Library, without having to copy the music itself into iTunes. Making playlists does still seem to have to go manually. Sometimes the "New Playlist from Selection" option automatically gives a name (the original name) to the album from which the music came, sometimes it doesn't. Rationale not clear to me. Other problem: often the sequence is jumbled (this is after I added the whole collection of folders containing music to my iTunes Library in one fell swoop). Usually it was possible to correct this by copying track names for albums one album at a time from the external HD (in Columns view, selecting all the tracks in each folder simultaneously) directly into the playlist; the playlist name then always had to be copied or typed in separately. I don't know if I'm missing an easier route. Also, I see that I have version 4.7.1 of iTunes - I'll download a newer version! Don't know whether newer version will affect what I want to do in a positive sense.