I prefer to have my music stored as generic mp3 files so just used a free CD ripper and then drag and dropped the tracks into itunes and then sync up. I prefer to make my own playlists so always tick the ‘manage music manually’ box but you can upload whole albums and hopefully the CD ripper you’ve used will have tagged all the tracks, which itunes will pick up and label the tracks and put them in album order for you.
See I never understood peoples need to go out there way to ‘avoid iTunes’ when you are just doing stuff it does anyway.
ITunes will rip to mp3 if you want it to.
It will identify the CD when you rip it.
It will store your tunes by the artist/album in a location of your choosing.
It has the capability to create manual playlists, so keeping a record of them if you decide to remove in preference to another playlist, compared to trying to remember what songs you manually dropped on the device last time.
You can sync any combination of manual playlists to a device, along with albums or artists etc. then come back and swap them for something else next time, all in a few clicks.