Add songs to iPod without using iTunes?

ITunes and the ITunes Store are 2 different things. AFIK iTunes is the ONLY way to get things on the ipods. I ripped my cd's to mp3's, and had itunes locate them on the computer, then load them onto my iphone.

You can do anything on iTunes with any songs. Songs from the Apple Store don't have any advantage over songs from you CD.

I have all my music ripped to my computer. I think you need iTunes to at least enable the disk drive mode. I think you could then load music just from the computer but you probably won't get playlists. Now I have not tried this myself as I have no issue using iTunes. And like said before, iTunes will recognize any mp3s.

Anything he can put on his computer can be added to the device thru iTunes. You don't have buy music from Apple. Load his CD s, free music sites, whatever.

I dislike Ipod and itunes. But, my daughter now has an ipod. Here is what I do, but I am SURE there is a better way. Itunes will see any MP3 or music file you have on your computer. We buy all of our music from Amazon and keep it on their "cloud". After buying I will download it to an external hard drive. once downloaded, as soon as I open ITunes, it recognizes the newly downloaded song, and I can pop it into her playlist and sync the device.