Linux

After years of convincing myself that an MP3 player was something that wouldn’t benefit me in the slightest, I decided to treat myself to a Samsung YP-P3 as a “post-Christmas, hurray it’s 2010″ present.  Since starting my PhD, I have found myself walking alone and sitting on trains far more often than I have at any other time in my life; it ‘s become more and more important to drown out the noise of other people’s music and inane chatter. Part impulse buy, part “necessity”, I’m quite impressed so far.

Here it is, in all of its “taking ages to transfer files” glory…

Sorry I didn't take a photo of it doing something more interesting...

You might be wondering why, since this is my first MP3 player purchase, I jumped in with something quite so expensive (£200 for the 32GB model) that wasn’t manufactured by Apple.  The reasons are many, and the most important are outlined below:

• File Formats
  The YP-P3 supports: MP3/WMA/OGG/AAC/FLAC/WAV/ASF
  Yup.  OGG and FLAC.  Since most of the music I have ripped is in OGG (being an open-source Linux advocate), one of my biggest problems with Apple’s iPods and their “rivals” is their seeming inability to play anything but MP3.  Sure, you can flash the firmware, but the point is that you shouldn’t have to.

• Linux!
  Okay, so the YP-P3 doesn’t “support” Linux.  It comes bundled with a piece of software called EmoDio that you’re supposed to use to transfer your music to and from the player (and thus keep your library synced), but it’s by no means compulsory.  In fact, the first thing I did upon turning on the YP-P3 was to switch it from MTP to UMS — a switchover that was no hassle at all. This essentially causes the player to appear as a removable drive when it’s plugged in, meaning that rearranging the library is a drag-and-drop job.  Perfect.

The interface is pretty, it’s skinnable, has widgets, and the touch screen is very responsive.  It even vibrates when you touch something, providing the tactile feedback that is often missing from this sort of interface.

I only have one niggle with the YP-P3 so far, and admittedly it is a rather minor one.  It seems to me, based on my admittedly limited research, that the album cover system is implemented solely through ID3 tags.  This is a minor annoyance for MP3 and OGG files, since getting album art to appear requires manually tagging each and every MP3 and OGG on my system.  It’s an even bigger problem for WMA, M4A and FLAC, since I haven’t found any way to edit their tags.

I hope that somebody somewhere comes up with a way of forcing the YP-P3 to look for a “folder.jpg” image, or at least an easier way of making sure it knows where the images are.  If that happened, I wouldn’t be able to fault it at all.  An iPod beater?  I certainly think so.