Yea I've looked everywhere for a solution and haven't found one. I think apple is slowly placing all these types of restrictions so that you keep having to by music from them....I think they realized people where just hooking up their ipods to other people's computers and getting music once they clicked the "manually manage music box"...you can't do that anymore...Now they must of realized that people where hooking up external hard drives and just dragging music to them from the itunes to the desk top...you can't do that anymore either...
It's the same reason you can't use adobe flash player on the iphone or ipad...if you could watch tv shows on hulu, you're not going to buy them from itunes are you? These greedy bastards are no different from the cell phone and cable companies: they slowly make it so you depend on them and have no other options, then they steal all your money cause they no you don't have any other choice...before you could use windows media player or music box instead of itunes, but know since you have and ipod, ipad, and iphone, you're stuck using itunes...greedy bastards