Sharing itunes on pc and mac

I recently got hold of a mac and now I need to load my library onto it. I already have it om am external drive from my vista machine. Unfortunately when I go to add the foldr to itunes, the mac doesn't see it. It can see the Itunes folder, but not the itunes music folder inside. It can be viewed, along with all of the other songs, on my windows machine. I don't want to have to reload all songs (make copies) on the drive to import. Is there an easier way to share a library between windows and mac?
Thanks

Open the Advanced section of the iTunes preferences, turn off the option to automatically copy content to the iTunes Music folder, and then drag the iTunes folder into the open iTunes window. Playlists and other metadata won't be preserved, and the drive will need to be plugged in when you want to access the songs.
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