[HD2 General] MandrakeMan:
Hi,

I've had the HD2 since before Christmas and generally it's great and for connectivity etc, it beats my lady's iphone, but to the subject in hand...

When i got the phone i put a 16Gb card in and stuck all 8Gb of music i had on my reluctantly let go N95 - i know they were looking dated, but it was sturdy as a brick, had GPS, good memory, battery life...

I immediately then had problems with the HD2, it couldn't play for more than 20 or 30 seconds, it was constantly trying to update the music etc, this is fairly easy to fix though, there is a free program for tag checking/fixing on this forum elsewhere. Once you run it on your files on your HD2s card, you'll find some do have errors, get it to fix tham and the HD2 will now stop endlessly trying to scan your music and play it.

Use MP3tag - free and easy to find on web - to correctly name your tracks and artists, this makes life alot easier in finding what you are after.

If you want the HD2 to display artwork - this took some working out - you can make it do so using the following steps:

1 - get the cover artwork you want, open it in Photoshop or equivalent, resize it to 256x256pixels, then save it out (resolution 72dpi, and save out at 6 in Photoshop, it's more than enough for tiny display covers) to the music album folder it needs to live in naming it hTC_AM_AlbumArt.jpg

Once it's saved, go to the folder, right click on the file, click properites, uncheck 'archived' and check 'hidden'. Bingo, this will make sure the artwork you want will appear. It does work, I spent alot of time sorting out my music over Christmas, as music is what i do and this kind of thing bothers me.

You can use HTC's auto artwork function and it does work ok generally for well known stuff, but if you need to plug artwork gaps, use the above.

Glitches in playing... I've found that if you leave Wi-Fi and Data enabled then it does cause pauses generally in quite a few apps, not just the music player, though it is obviously bloody annoying having a 5 second break mid song. Simply switch off Wi-Fi & Data (i'm not 100% sure which is causing it, but it's when the handset is trying to sync out). You'll find then you don't get any interruptions in your music. And let's face it, going to Wireless Connections only takes 2 seconds to switch them on and off. Though granted, HTC should REALLY sort this out.

Main problems i have with the HTC built in music player is the following:

1 If you wizz the Touch Flow album covers too fast, it bugs out and flips to whichever end it is closest to. Annoying.

2 On contacts you get the A to Z slider to speed up finding who you are after, why in hell not on the music player for artists etc???

3 If you go to an artist, say Janis Joplin, play a track, if you then go 'back' to the artist list, are you at J still, NOPE, you are back at A. Annoying. Scroll, scroll, scroll.

4 Why no function for you to choose artwork from a specific folder, which would save all the above fuss, plus an MP3 tag editor/fixer, hardly rocket science in this day and age.

There are other points that will come back to mind once I hit submit I'm sure.

Not related to the music player, but does anyone know if there's a fix for the really annoying way the cursor jumps from where you are when writing a text and you click on 'add symbol'. It jumps to the start of the text, which if u are only briefly above ground on the tube, is really sodding annoying. The keyboard isn't quite as good as the iPhone as it is - a point i'm loathed only to admit to other HD2 users ;-)

Hope some of this helps.

Cheers