Talk:PortablePlayers/SamsungYepp

YP-T7Z

JoshuaRodman wrote regarding the yp-t7z:

I received such a unit. It plays oggs encodd at -q 4, 5 and 6 without error that I have noticed. However it seems underdocumented. It plays the files in an order which is neither alpha sorted nor numeric sorted, and it does not support ogg tags. -- JoshuaRodman (March 28, 2005)

I've investigated more. Some music encoded at even -q 5 will break up or cause difficulty. I suspect these pieces have bitrate spikes. As for the ordering, the YP-T7 plays files in 'readdir' order. That is it does not sort the files out of the filesystem at all. In practice, this means it will play the files in the order that you add them to the directory. If you are a windows user dragging and dropping the files onto the player, this problem will not affect you. A linux or possible Mac user may need to do minor scripting to alleviate this issue. --JoshuaRodman (April 13, 2005)

I thought I came back and clarified this, but don't have hte energy to review the edit history. In any event, there are no problems with OGG playback on my YP-T7z at this time. All symptoms have evaporated with firmware updates or magic. JoshuaRodman 01:27, 7 April 2006 (PDT)

Spaz added for the YP-T7Z:

After using the newest firmware I have had no issues playing OGG files. Any lockup or playback issues I had experienced went away. --Spaz (Dec 23, 2005)

Ulrich added for the YP-MT6Z:

I think my manual says the first 8 characters of a filename are considered for sorting. As my files have the "tracknumber" tag, I wrote some Perl script that prepends that number (two digits plus a space) to the track names when being copied onto the player. I'm not sure about decoding problems, but there may be some. I encoded my files at q6 or higher using "oggenc" from Linux. Tags for title and performer are displayed unless you follow the Vorbis specification to create one tag for each performer. However, be aware that default settings have tag display disabled!

The chip inside seems to be a Sigmatel STMP3400M, natively specified for MP3 with addon codecs.

It would be great of Samsung Europe would release firmware with release notes (the Korean site has newer firmware, but no English, really!). There's also some inoffical newer firmware around, but also without any release notes. Official firmware is 2.122 (on my player as delivered and on CD and website).

Recently I decided to remove some Ogg files from the player and add a few new ones. Unfortunately this resulted in some directories (usually structured as <artist>/<album>/<track-number> <track-title>) being unplayable. There's just a message saying "No Entry". Interestingly this happens with directories that did play before removing some files. Newer firmware didn't change anything about that. I suspect that this is caused by either 1) special characters in the file names (I use UTF-8 encoding), 2) special characters in the Vorbis comment, 3) length of file names, 4) number of files in the file system, or 5) amount of free space (my player has just 90kB free now). One symptom is that in Settings->System->About there are fewer files counted than actually exist in the filesystem. And yes, I've checked the filesystem several times. I have contacted German support, and they replied they'll investigate, but they did not ask back about any details (and support doesn't allow to reply).

With the new inofficial firmware 2.290 I had a few crashes: The player was playing a continuous tone, and the only way to stop it was to remove the battiery for a moment. However as the effect was not repeatable when playing the same file, I can believe that some mobile phone triggered that. The other thing is the fact that my player came without FM radio. The newer firmware has the radio item in firmware, but as soon as I select it, the player will hang until the battery is removed. OK, that's inofficial firmware...

--(Ulrich on 2006-02-02)

Two questions: 1) are ogg tags not being displayed even when the Tag option is toggle to On in the settings menu? 2) how does it handle -q 4 and -q 6 — is it just -q 5, or is it -q 5 and higher/lower? — Saxifrage 01:07, 14 Apr 2005 (PDT)

I have seen no evidence of vorbis tags being supported; they are not displayed. I have generally encoded at -q 5 as an attempt to stay inside the "supported" bitrate boundaries. I find that the bitrate and breakups are not directly correlated, but somewhat related. This is no surprise if the problem is CPU time exhaustion. I have not found any particular quality encoding to fail either reliably or often. In general, speeds above the stated maximum supported bitrates have seemed to work fine. No lockups of any kind have been encountered. Incidentally, over 90% of my ogg files have been processed by vorbisgain. --JoshuaRodman (July 5, 2005)

I just bought one of these and I'm baffled by its erratic Ogg support. Firmware version 1.541 seems to support tags just fine, though I haven't noticed the alpha-sorting issue (haven't looked). However, I find that it can't play all my Ogg files (freezes when it tries to load the file), and there's nothing systematic that I've found to account for this. It plays some files I encoded Jan 29-Jan 30, 2005, but there are files that don't work before and after that date. The files that work so far were encoded with nominal bitrates of 128 and 192, while others that don't work were at 160. All encodings have used the same program (Grip under Linux). Ogg files that I've encoded with oggenc directly for testing purposes at 160 nominal bitrate work just fine. There's just something about most of my existing files.

I've emailed a support request to Samsung Canada, so I'll report what I find out then. Meanwhile I'm doing a bunch of rips with Grip to test different nominal bitrates. Saxifrage 10:53, 12 Apr 2005 (PDT)

Results from my experiments with different nominal bitrates are summarised in this table:

YP-T6 Ogg Vorbis support
Bitrate (nominal)
	Tags	none	tag*	tag + replaygain	replaygain
128		works	works	works	?
160		works	works	freezes	works
192		works	works	works	?

* "tag" means just the regular complement of artist, album, title, year, and genre.

"?" indicates that the case was not tested

My conclusion is that the Samsung YP-T6 can't handle Ogg Vorbis files encoded at 160 nominal bitrate if ReplayGain tags are applied to the file. Note too that I tested a file without real RG tags, but with the normal tags plus tags with different names than the standard RG tags but with the same name-length and same length of arguments; this was to isolate whether it was a ReplayGain-specific bug or a general tag-handling bug. Thus, I suspect that the problem is a buffer overflow in tag code of the firmware. Note that I have only tested files encoded with nominal bitrates, not files encoded with oggenc's quality settings.

The few files in my collection that have worked were encoded at different bitrates (either 128 or 192), but unfortunately the vast majority are 160, and I need ReplayGain to be able to listen to my collection on the PC without constantly changing the volume. As a workaround I may write a script to strip the ReplayGain tags as they're moved to my player, but this rather sucks. — Saxifrage 12:36, 12 Apr 2005 (PDT)

YP-T7JZ/T7JX

Samsung appears to have model bumped the yp-t7 series with the yp-t7j series. The spec sheet does not mention OGG/Vorbis as a supported file format. This seems a real shame as the t7 worked well. Does anyone have anything more conclusive? JoshuaRodman 08:26, 6 January 2006 (PST)

MT-6X

I (Gav) own a Yepp MT-6X and I don't come to the same conclusions. I tried to remove the Gain tags and it didn't improve anything. Here are some tests I made :

YP-MT6X Ogg Vorbis support
Encoder version	Filename	Nominal bitrate	Playback test
Xiphophorus libVorbis I 20000508 (1.0 beta 1 or beta 2)	01 - In Tenebris.ogg	unset (160 kbps)	KO
Xiphophorus libVorbis I 20001031 (1.0 beta 3)	01 - A Day Without Rain.ogg	160 kbps	KO
Xiphophorus libVorbis I 20010225 (1.0 beta 4)	01 - Sunday Bloody Sunday.ogg	128 kbps	KO
Xiphophorus libVorbis I 20010615 (1.0 rc1)	01 - Remede.ogg	128 kbps	KO
Xiphophorus libVorbis I 20010813 (1.0 rc2)	01 - Devil's Haircut.ogg	192 kbps	OK
Xiphophorus libVorbis I 20011231 (1.0 rc3)	01 - Encore Une Chance.ogg	112 kbps	OK
Xiph.Org libVorbis I 20020717 (1.0)	01 - Inferno (Unleash The Fire).ogg	160 kbps	KO
Xiph.Org libVorbis I 20030909 (1.0.1)	01 - You Will Be a Hot Dancer.ogg	128 kbps	OK

Yes, a 1.0 file fails... I also tested a 8 second file encoded at q1,q2,...,q10 using 20020717 (1.0) and it worked for every quality ! So not every 1.0-encoded file fails. See YeppGavDetails for details about the files.

OK. I've done extensive tests and I can confirm what Saxifrage suggested : there is indeed a buffer overflow in the tag handling ! When the framing bit of the tag header is at offset >= 0x18C, it fails. If it is at exactly 0x18C, it reboots or freezes. If it is at offset > 0x18C, it always freezes. This was tested with firmware 1.101 and vorbis encoder 1.0.

The file encoded using libVorbis 1.0 in the table above has a too large tag and that's why it fails.

In summary, the Yepp can only play Vorbis when it is encoded with libVorbis version >= 1.0rc2 AND when the framing bit of the tag header is at offset < 0x18C.

YP-T6

I've got this model with 256MB of flash memory, and unlike above, I ran into problems when I tried to play very-low-bitrate files (< 64kbps, CD format). I encoded them using aoTuV-beta4 experiment version from aoyumi (which creates (or should create) perfectly standard and conforming files), using command-line oggenc under linux. The qualities I used for these problematic files are -q-1 (~45kbps) and -q-2 (~32kbps), and when the player tries to open the file it freezes, but for qualities from -q0 it works perfectly.

Apart from that, I've had no real problem before, using mostly -q6 files from RC3 and 1.0, without tags or with standard ones. Sometimes the sound is distorted a lot for a few tenths of seconds, it seems to be related to bitrate peaks (applauds, etc.).

Hope this will be useful, anyway thanks for the investigations on this player, I also realized the lack of information on this player's ogg support. Superdupont 16:49, 2 Aug 2005 (PDT)

Edit: firmware version: 1.543

The YP-T6 seems to be almost identical to the Trekstor i.Beat Cube.

The YP-T6s sold in the US sports an FM Radio with 16 saved settings and automatic station search. Recording from a radio program to MP3 is possible. At least the German version of the YP-T6 does not have an built-in tuner.

The German web site has moved it from from "MP3 players" to the Archived MP3 players section, while the US and UK site lists it as regular model. I don't know if this indicates that Samsung is about to stop production of the T6 or if there have been problems on the German market (like restrictive radio emission laws, see built-in tuner section above).

YP-T9

This player only supports MTP, not USB Storage. Using libmtp on Linux, I've managed to successfully transfer files to the YP-T9, but I have to rename the files to .mp3. I hacked libmtp to set the file type of .ogg files to MP3, and that wasn't enough -- but simply renaming the files to have an .mp3 extension has it playing them fine. I'm using the latest available firmware (2006-10-19, posted 2006-11-13). --MatthewWilcox 00:44, 27 November 2006 (PST)

YP-53

I'am not sure what's inside this player. May be it's a STMP3505. With firmware 1.200 it plays Ogg Vorbis, but not at very low bitrates(-q-1 and -q-2).nostromo 4 Nov 2005.

Firmware 1.200 is a bit difficult to find, googling by file name (YP-53_V1.200.zip) gets a single relevant result: Korean page with a link to the updater. If it disappears, contact me (inejge) via this site (E-mail this user on the linked page).

The new firmware is much nicer than the previous release (my player came with V1.024):

It plays OGGs, starting with -q0.
The main screen is better organized.
Menus are cleaned up (and with more eye candy).
Non-ASCII characters in tags are displayed properly (tested with OGG).

Note: if you are encoding OGGs at -q0, don't try to set the lower bitrate limit to 64 kb/s -- the player can choke on managed bitrate files. Nominal bitrate is all that counts.

--Inejge 06:32, 12 Dec 2005 (PST)

YP-U1

Firmware 2.242: Plays Vorbis OK with tag support. Tested with aoTuV beta 4.51 and Xiph.org Vorbis between -q2 and -q8 (mostly at -q5; manual claims support from -q0 to -q10), no lockups so far. Experienced unusual distortion at one point of a particular track (loud, percussive synthetic "thunderclap") at -q5, decreasing with increasing -q value; this appears to be caused by a spike in bitrate, solved by passing encoding options

--managed -b160 -M192

--ettlz 07:35, 25 January 2006 (PST)

OK, I've experienced a few (very rare) lockups with firmware 2.242, but nothing major. Has anyone tried the new 3.122 firmware on the YP-U1? I've e-mailed Samsung to ask what changes this makes, but the didn't seem to know much. --Ettlz 13:06, 10 November 2006 (PST)

YP-U2

Firmware 1.301: A YP-U2J out of the box, purchased in the US will not support OGG, even though Samsung's web site claims it does for the YP-U2 product home page. There are lots of firmware from other countries that will allow your YP-U2J to support OGG, but it took me a long time to figure out one that did OGG and had a working FM Radio feature. Other firmwares would not include the FM Radio feature or the FM Radio feature would lock up the YP-U2J as soon as it was started. I did find one however that worked. Note that at the time of this post you will have to agree to the following legal question in order to get an OGG-compatible, FM Radio featured YP-U2J.

Our Global Download Center provides access to downloadable content for Samsung products or services sold throughout the world. Please note that the contents offered through the Global Download Center may not be suitable for products or services available in your country. Samsung assume no responsibility, and shall not be liable, in connection with whether any such products or services will be appropriate, functional or supported for the Samsung products or services available in your country.

I was successful with the 1.301 firmware version which I obtained via the following method from the samsung.com website:

1) From a browser go to www.samsung.com
2) Click on Support, then Download Center.
3) Select your model by searching for YP-U2JXB.
4) Note at the present (7/31/2006) there is not a newer offered firmware for this selected model. However there is still the ability to get a firmware release for it. So from this page click on "the global download center" link.
5) Pop-up windows will open and if you agree to the legal question which is mentioned above then click Accept.
6) Now narrow down to your model by selecting the following from the scrollable panes from left to right:
     |TV, Video & Audio|
     |Digital Audio Player|
     |Yepp|
     |YP-U2XB|
7) In the new page click Firmware.
8) Click the link for YP-U2XB Firmware upgrade (ver.1.301).
9) Run the setup.exe from the zip to install the YP-U2 updater software.
10) Follow the zipped instructions for how to flash the firmware.

- esterud

Awesome! Other improvements with version 1.301 are:
1 It is no longer an MPT device (that I can tell) so you can now load the YP-U2 with drag and drop on Windows XP Explorer. Windows Media Player still works the same.
2 It fixes the play only in alphabetic ID3 label name, not track order bug. The play order can now be arranged in filename order using numerics - messy playlists no longer required.
- holymakeral

This firmware is no longer available from samsung, at least by following the instructions above, browsing from where I am. I called Samsung customer support and was told that Microsoft has made it a criteria for "Janus/ MPP" compliance that portable players sold in the USA must NOT support Ogg playback, so any talk of playing Ogg files on their website is untrue if you buy in the US. Terrible.

- zebedee

As of 9.14.2006, this firmware is still available via the instructions above. Make sure you follow the "global download center" link near the bottom of the page as mentioned in Step 4.
Also, the new firmware makes this a standard USB thumbdrive (not an MPT device), so linux (and windows) recognizes it easily and it does, in fact play ogg. (zebedee is correct if you only consider the stock firmware.)
- wwonderllama

If the updater endlessly keeps searching for your hardware, be sure to read the help file in the updater zip file. You must plug in the YP-U2, hold the play button on the top of the device, and use a pin or something to punch the reset button on the end. Keep holding the play button while it updates.

- van

This firmware also works on the YP-U2JQB/XAA, allowing it to appear as a standard USB thumbdrive, and also fixing the playback order issue that it has. (the actual version of American firmware my player came with was higher than the European version linked above, but the lower European version has better features and less bugs...)

-abbub

29 September 2006. I used a 'newer' version on a US model YP-U2J ZW. Ver. No. 1.305. Again, be sure to 'press' play and 'reset' when the installer searches for the drive. Love that it is a standard USB thumbdrive, and files can be played/organized by folders.

04 October 2006 Just bought an YP-U2JQB/XAA yesterday and got the "International" YP-U2 firmware flashed without a problem (look at the "help" html document in the firmware updater zip file). Love that it plays OGG and shows up under Linux as a USB mass storage device. Amazing little player.

Two complaints:

OGG tags don't seem to be working. Has anyone been able to get the player to interpret the OGG tags?
Doesn't seem to have any way to upload playlists (with the new firmware). Has anyone been able to do this?

-jspiegel

18 October 2006 Brown Bag Admission: Ogg tags (and id3) work if you go Settings->Display->Tag->On (duh!) Still haven't found a way to upload playlists... Considering reverse engineering the PLAYLIST file in the SYSTEM directory...

-jspiegel

31 October 2006 I also just bought an YP-U2JQB/XAA (US model), and successfully updated to the 1.305 firmware. Navigation is so much better! Tell you what though; I found an alternate method of getting at the firmware. Go to www.samsung.com, and select "Australia" in the Country/Region dropdown at the top of the page. Then choose "Support", and enter the model "YP-U2Z". Then click "Firmware", and there it is. No messy agreements or popups.

-overdrive

2 Nov 2006 YP-U2JQB/XAA 2GB - To get to the 1.301 firmware from the US, I had to go to www.samsung.com, type directly in the search box on the front page "yp-u2xb firmware". First search result is "Digital Audio Player Yepp YP-U2XB Firmware", this is the one you want. 1.300 and 1.301 firmware are available there. I got 1.301 .

Ogg playback, FM radio works, USB mass storage, all good. However... The unit seems subject to random restarts with this firmware. I never tried it with the factory original (Stupid PlaysForSure!) firmware. It has restarted itself right in the middle of a song, no button presses or anything. When it comes back up, it is in the state that it was when it last started up, IE it forgot about the song it was in the middle of playing when it crashed. This has happened about twice in ~5 hours of use. I'll try the 1.305 when I get a chance. Kwan3217 08:19, 2 November 2006 (PST)

November 9, 2006 As jspeigel and Kwan3217 mentioned, the US XAA model will also support this firmware. It changes the functionality significantly. Some things I didn't see mentioned is that it no longer navigates by ID3 tags, but filenames and folders. I wish it used the ID3 tags and paid attention to the track ordering, but I'll take the filenames over alphabetic ID3 navigation anyday. :)

Also, the Playlist funtion in this firmware is essentially the same as the Favorites function in the previous firmware. When you are viewing tracks in a track listing, you can press the user defined key and it will star the track which adds it to your Playlist. Apparently this device only supports a single playlist, but I did notice if you hit the play button on a folder it will dynamically create a playlist out of the files in that folder, so it serves the same funtion as playlists on the old firmware. So, jspeigel, no need to reverse engineer the playlist function. :)

Also, Kwan3217, I had a couple of random restarts with the original firmware, so it may be a hardware or file problem, and as you mentioned, when it restarted, it came back with the volume and track position at the same place it was when I last turned it on, so I assume it writes that info out when it shuts down gracefully.

Anybody looking into hacking the firmware to get something like Rockbox on this player?

hwlester

November 17, 2006

I purchased a YP-U2JZW/XAA from Target last night (Clearance 39.90!) and thanks to this page was able to download the firmware mentioned, although the new firmware is 1.351. I just finished flashing the update and am happy to report it works great. I haven't tried an OGG file yet, as I don't use OGG much, but I flashed it mainly to enable UMS mode so that I can drag and drop from iTunes for Windows, and it works wonderfully. I do miss the ability to browse via ID3 tags, but Folders/Filenames will have to do until someone can edit the firmware.

I've had no resets so far, maybe 1.351 fixes the reboots.

Thanks for this wiki page!

howiecam

November 17, 2006

Thanks for the heads-up about the release of 1.351. I've confirmed that this is available via Samsung's Australian support website. I'd kill for a changelog.

-overdrive

urls to the firmware

The updates can be found here:

Version 1.300

http://downloadcenter.samsung.com/content/FM/200604/20060428084712140_U2_ver1300_KOR.zip

Version 1.351

http://downloadcenter.samsung.com/content/FM/200611/20061113104527718_YP-U2_VER1351_OC_LCD.zip

Both are supposedly the international version despite the "_KOR.zip" at the end of file one. I have not installed either of these yet, I'll post my results later. -WeFeeling

December 12, 2006

I bought a YP-U2J QB (2GB) yesterday and wanted to get it to work with linux. Currently Samsung's Global Downlad Center has the following firmware files for varous YP-U2 models:

1.300: 20060428084712140_U2_ver1300_KOR.zip 1.352: 20061113104441125_YP-U2_VER1352_EU_LCD.zip 1.353: 20061113104441125_YP-U2_VER1353_FRA_LCD.zip 1.351: 20061113104527718_YP-U2_VER1351_OC_LCD.zip 1.355: 20061113104616968_YP-U2_VER1355_CH_LCD.zip

I installed 1.351 on it from a windows computer and it is working fine in linux as a UMS device. I followed the instructions for upgrading the firmware in the html file within the zip file. Ogg files play fine.

- Brishchik .