The Providers

One of the coolest features in Windows XP is its album thumbnail generator, which automatically places the appropriate album cover art on the folder to which you are copying music. For those people that have already copied their CDs to the hard drive using MP3 format, download album cover art from sites such as cdnow.com or amguide.com, and then use the new Windows XP folder customize feature to display the proper image for each folder. Unfortunately you have to manually edit the folder properties for every single folder. There's another way, however. When you download the album cover art from the Web, just save the images as folder.jpg and place them in the appropriate folder. Then, Windows XP will automatically use that image as the thumbnail for that folder and, best of all, will use that image in Media Player for Windows XP if you choose to display album cover art instead of visualization. The folder customization is automatic, so it survives an OS reinstallation as well.