I listen to a bunch of podcasts - a great way to fill the otherwise mindless space of a daily commute. My MP3 player is a Transonic brand, appears on my computer as a generic storage device.

I've been using iTunes to download the podcasts, and manually moving the files out of the disk folder onto my player, but this is pretty tedious. iTunes also fails to recognise that the files are gone and leaves them in the list. (Actually, iTunes for windows is pretty much a dog, but that's a different rant.)

The Zune software is 99% of what I want in a podcast downloader - performs well, looks nice, downloads reliably and so on. Some features - like only downloading the next five unheard episodes of a podcast - are superb.

However, if I manually move the files across to the MP3 player, the Zune software concludes that the file has never been downloaded, and downloads it again. This leads me to my question:

What is a good way to use the Zune software to download podcasts for listening on a generic MP3 player?

Are there any addons for the Zune software to make this easier? Registry hacks? Can I configure the Zune software to not download the same episode multiple times? Is there a way for the Zune software to populate my MP3 player directly, instead of having to copy files?