Getting album covers working on the HTC Hero

I’ve been strugling getting album art working properly with the music player included on the HTC Hero. Covers was only working for some albums. After a bit of googling and a few different tries, since there was a lot of misinformation on google about this problem, I finally figured out how it works. The player reads covers from a tag on the files. This is apparently the only way it supports covers. The player after reading a new cover, then thumnails them and stores the thumb in the albumart directory on the flash. The first application that I tried to add the album art to the files was Easytag, sadly it has a pretty nasty bugs that leads all the covers all fucked up. That combined with the caching of the player, left me strugling trying to correct the covers after I found a tagger that actually worked. So please don’t try that at home 🙂 My second try was Kyamo, which I can’t recommend sadly. There are simply too many things that sucks in it. Things that combined makes fixing up ~10gb music a complete pain in the ass. I finally settled with Mp3tag, it’s for Windows, but at least it works quite well and its free (as in beer). Another annoying thing about the player is that, while it supports Ogg Vorbis, it doesn’t understand covers embedded in ogg. So no cover for those albums. Ah yeah, I should probably also mention that the thumbs generated are in 320×320, so in my experience around 500×500 pixels works best.

Hopefully this should help others, who have been struggling with figuring out how the hell the music player on the HTC Hero handles covers.