This might work:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=300173. If that's not it, I'm sure there's a method simpler than you're expecting.
As someone else already said, this is all because of the music companies and their lovely ideas for digital rights management that treat consumers as criminals before they're treated as customers. You just have to live getting around the DRM and having restricted music management.
For me though, I've never had an issue with how iTunes does things, and I think Apple did a pretty good job keeping the DRM simple and transparent. I would never buy their DRMed shit from their online store, but it's slick at dealing with the mp3s I already have. There are a lot of benefits that go along with the way iTunes does things, like automatically saving your place from computer to iPod back to your computer on audiobooks, movies or podcasts. You keep play ratings, descriptions, and tags across all devices. You can keep your music organized easily in one place in the program even though it may be scattered all across hard drives and networks. Podcasts automatically update and download in iTunes and automatically sync to iPods without you having to do anything.
Drag and drop would be nice just to have the option, but the way iTunes keeps everything clean and transparent works for me. Add
everything you have to iTunes, make a playlist, drop things into that playlist, and sync it. Pretty much just like drag and drop except it has that extra step of having to sync.
