Ubuntu: Some USB problems

I wrote a little Python program to copy my downloaded podcasts to my MP3 player(s). It works farely well, except, on occasion I'll get a podcast that's scrambled. It'll start with one podcast and in the middle there would be another. It's like the FAT table is screwed up or wasn't properly flushed. I have noticed that when I unmount the MP3 player using the icon in the desktop it'll go away immediately, but the device itself will continue flashing on it's display (maybe indicating that it's copying something?). Eventually, it would stop flashing.
Also, if I run "mount -l" I'll still see the drive for a while until it get's fully unmounted. What I need is a way to be sure that it's safe to unplug the device or a method of forcing a flush to disk after I've copied everything, it's very fustrating.

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