Here's what I did to rip songs from my brother in laws itunes to mine (trying to avoid burning onto CD's)

I took my flashdrive from his comp and ran home with it...
inserted into my comp, loaded them directly into itunes...no problem.

however, when the flashdrive is taken out, itunes is telling me that it cannot find the original file, hence, cannot play the song (or load it onto my ipod)

so...I took the flashdrive and created file folders with those songs under My Music, which contains my itunes stuff...

Then, I go back to itunes, which tells me still cannot find original files, do I want to manually locate the files? Now, I know where they are (because I just created the folders), so I locate the folders, open, and my songs are playing. But, I don't want to do this to every single song....is there a short cut?????

Itunes really, really makes things difficult.

You have to transfer the songs from the flash drive to your computer and then import them into iTunes.

I guess what I should say is, since you've done half the step: Delete the iTunes files that are currently there. Then go to File>>Add Folder to Library and choose the songs that have already been saved to your computer so you don't have to do it individually.
[Edited 1/30/10 8:27am]

Go to preferences and change to location of your itunes library.
When itunes rips your songs, it will rip it to the location on your hard drive and not the flash drive..

That is unless you want the flash drive to be your location. In which case you should only need to plug in your flash drive before using iTunes. But this is on a mac. I have no clue what happens on a PC. I assumed the same thing?

Efan said:

This worked PERFECTLY!!! Thanks so much...aye, aye, aye, itunes can be such a headache! There is an ADD FOLDER TO LIBRARY and an ADD FILE TO LIBRARY, which worked better for those songs which I already had the artist in itunes, but only added a current song, ala Jay-Z.

So, I had the process backwards. Create the file first, THEN import...
[Edited 1/30/10 9:06am]