Loading mp3's onto sansa fuze

I gotta admit, as much as I dislike iTunes for its sluggishness and lack of control, it is the most reliable way of loading mp3 onto a player I have seen so far. It is only too bad that iTunes cannot be used with other devices. I have been thus far unable to find a good way of putting mp3 files onto Sansa players. Rhapsody used to crash all the time, the Yahoo player crashed as well plus had some quirky behaviors when using it with Sansa e280. At some point I discovered that unlike the iPods, Sansa players allow one to copy mp3 files straight into its folders. The problem is that as a result the device sometimes would freeze. When I was loading music onto a couple of new Fuzes that I got as gifts I decided against installing the new software that came with the devices and loaded the files manually, so to speak, by copying them through Windows Explorer. The results so far were just fine. Maybe things have improved? I much prefer bypassing silly software solutions if files can be copied directly.