I do use WMP (WMP 10) to synchronise
protected files. I don't use WMP to synchronize
unprotected files, I just copy them as normal using Windows Explorer - which seems fast and easy.
The original reason for this was partly that I only wanted to copy a subset of all my music files (not every track in every folder), but mainly that letting WMP do the copying for all files generates too many
folders for the player to handle (it has an undeclared limit of 50 folders, small for a 2GB device), as well as superfluous files such as album art. I reduce the number of folders by copying similar types of track into one folder. Also, most of my files are unprotected, and I didn't know about the protection problem when I started.
Once I have set up my player I take a copy of what's on it, from which I can easily reload the player whenever it gets wiped, or whenever I want a different set of folders from which it plays. (I guess that I could still do this if I followed your suggestion?)
My approach seems to work most of the time, except that
sometimes all the files get deleted when I start up the player, and
sometimes "shuffle play" stops playing shuffled and goes linear - see my
link for details.
I could (and probably will) adapt my approach and do all the copying through WMP, as you suggest. But if doing it in the way I do it is causing some of my problems, can you explain
which of the problems it is causing and
why? (For example, if I use WMP to copy and then reorganise the files do I still have problems?) I would greatly appreciate it!