I'm not a big fan of iTunes, either. (Personally, I don't like the concept of keeping a database of your music in a program since I have multiple computers all sharing the same network share of mp3s, and that means updating the database on each machine each time I rip new music. Huge pain.) Fortunately, you can totally avoid using the ``features'' of iTunes and simply use it as an upload program. You can just drag-and-drop files from your filesystem directly on the iPod icon within iTunes and it'll never try to integrate them into the iTunes database.