shuffle: no manual song managing?

So, I got my mom a 2GB Shuffle a few weeks ago, and uploaded something like 10 albums. I then deleted all of them off iTunes, since it's not my music. It all disappeared the next time I plugged the Shuffle in, obviously, so I came here and found out that Shuffles can't be manually updated/managed.

Since most posts were quite old, I still had some hope that things would have changed by now. But they didn't, did they?

I'll have to keep all her music in iTunes?