Help!

I've been gifted with an iPod "nano". I was grateful and thrilled, but so far it's been very difficult to register, install, and try to load with tunes. But that's not the problem.

Here's the larger question--am I ever going to be able to include my own 'homemade' mp3s on this sucker, and if so how?   Apparently the Ipod and iTunes are set up for commercial recordings which have artist and track info encoded.   

My hand-converted lps and tapes don't have this encoding. (When I first started burning CDs from these old materials, I would painstakingly key in song titles, only to find Media Player still considered it 'unknown' and ignored my file names in favor of 'track 1', 'track 2', so I gave it up. It has worked fine for burning CDs from my wavs, and on the hard drive the mp3 versions have song titles as their filenames and are contained in album 'folders'.

Has anybody out there been able to use iTunes to encode this info? -- Or is there some cheapware out there that will let me encode these mp3s with artist/album/song info that can be read regardless of the software used?