MP3 players (USB devices) -- how compatible?

[Conrad Sabatier]

I am desperately in need of an MP3 player to use at work, in order to preserve
my sanity.  :-)  Seriously, one of my supervisors insists on having the most
god-awful radio station playing throughout the building all day long, one which
repeats the same tired playlist over and over and over at intervals of roughly
two hours.  It's enough to make one go postal (and I happen to work for the
Postal Service, too, by the way).  :-)

Anyway, with the proliferation of USB devices available nowadays, I'm just
wondering how safe or risky would it be to just go ahead and grab one and hook
it up to my machine.  Is it a simple matter of configuring it as a umass device
and just copying files over to the player?  Or are most of them really that
dependent on the proprietary Windows/Mac software that comes bundled with most
of the them?

Thanks for any feedback!

-- 
Conrad Sabatier <conrads at cox.net> - "In Unix veritas"