By Donald Bell

As much as I like the way iTunes neatly organizes my computer's music and video library, I don't often use the integrated iTunes download store for grabbing new content. Maybe I'm just cheap, but most of my weekly music downloads come from combing through freebies from Last.fm, Hype Machine, and other music blogs. (Last.fm is a part of CBS Interactive, which also publishes CNET Reviews. )

Unfortunately, adding Web downloads into iTunes has always been a hassle. Up until iTunes 9, the best way to ensure that your Web downloads get added to iTunes was to launch iTunes and drag the specific song or video directly into the iTunes window.

Personally, because iTunes runs slowly on my old computer, I would put off updating my library until it was absolutely necessary or I really wanted to hear a new song on my iPod. The result was a disjointed library of music where new songs languished in my download folder where I would never hear them.

Thankfully, iTunes 9 now offers a shortcut for adding media to your library without launching the program. To see how it works, I've made a short How To video (below) and slideshow to get you started.

Read the full story on the CNET blog Mp3 Insider.