Using Windows Media player to synchronize music to your device is probably the easiest way to manage music in playlists while also getting album art to display in the Windows Mobile Media Player. Not to mention, with the automatic WMA conversion features, you can get 8 Gigs worth of MP3s to fit on 4 Gigs of storage like that of the HTC Touch Diamond.

 

The Windows Media Player syncing method also happens to be recommended in the Touch Diamond’s Quick Start Guide and Windows Mobile’s Getting Started guide on the device itself. When Windows Media Player on the desktop converts and copies music to your device, it creates the proper folder structure and includes the album art as a JPG image file that’s stored in the same album folder as each track. This allows the media player software to re-use the same image for each track in that album.

 

The problem is that HTC’s Touch FLO 3D audio manager does not read those JPG files. So if you want to use the cool Today screen flippy 3D media player, you’re not going to see any album art. As it turns out, HTC’s audio manager reads the album art from each audio file’s embedded image metadata tags. Even if your MP3s on your desktop already include album art embedded into each file’s metadata, the artwork will not carry over after being converted by WMP’s syncing process. The artwork will instead be converted to the separate JPG format (so that WM Media Player can read them).

 

Here’s the work around for getting your album art to display in both Windows Media Player and the HTC TouchFLO 3D media player.

UPDATE: This problem occurs on ROM version 1.34.831.1WWE. It appears that some users on xda-developers have versions of TouchFLO 3D that DO read album art from the folder.jpg files, which means that the WMP syncing method will show album art on the home screen. Others, like myself, have a version of TouchFLO 3D that only reads embedded album art. This may have been fixed already in the latest shipping ROM.