How do I sync my Android Phone with Windows Media Player or Windows 7? (Simple and Free Solution!)

1. Assumes all music is in Windows 7 Media player.
2. Create a favorite lists in Windows 7 media player if you don’t already have them.  Note that the Windows Media player automatically generated favorite lists don’t seem to work.  You’ll have to create your own Windows Media play lists if you haven’t already.
3. Before you start, consider upgrading the mini SD card in your Android to 8GB, 16GB, or 32GB although not mandatory.   Using a class 2 vs class 6 vs class 10 SD card won’t impact performance for reading (playing back) music files from phone.  (Initially writing to the card will be slower for lower SD card class).
4. Attach the USB cable from PC to phone.
5. Mount the SD card on Windows XP.  Your phones manual will explain how to do this.
6. Open “My computer” and make sure the SD card is visible as a drive in Windows – note the drive letter of the SD card.
7. Close and restart Windows Media Player.
8. Make sure the SD card (drive letter) now appears in Windows Media player.
9. Select the driver letter for the SD card in Media player and select the “SYNC” tab.
10. Drag your Windows Media Player play lists to the SYNC tab.  Or you can simply drag all of the songs, albums, or artists to the “SYNC” tab.
11. Select “start sync”.
12. Once the copy is complete, your phone may be very slow for several minutes or longer while the songs are indexed on the phone.
13. Note that Windows 7 does not copy your play lists, but does copy the music files.  You’ll need to copy the play lists manually.
14. Find your “playlists” folder on Windows 7 – it should be in the “My Music” folder under your users folder.  Example path:  “C:\users\[user name]\My Music\playlists”.
15. Select and copy the entire “playlists” folder to the “music” folder on your Android phones SD card.  The “\music\playlists” folder will now appear on the SD card.
16. Eject the SD card from Windows 7 and unmount the device from Android.
17. Start your Android media player and all of your artists, albums, play lists, & songs will now appear.  The phone may take a few minutes or longer to build the playlists.

This may work with Windows XP with Windows Media Player 11 or earlier, but I have not tried it.  Please let me know if you’ve tried this successfully on earlier Media Player versions, and other Android phones (Droid, G1, CLIQ, Behold, Mytouch, Samsung Moment, Google Nexus One, etc.).  You can either send an e-mail or leave a comment here.

Enjoy!

I replaced my HTC Hero with a Samsung Galaxy S2 with Android 2.3 and this procedure worked well.