The Samsung YP-R1 (also known as Samsung R1 worldwide or Yepp R1 in

Korea Korea is a peninsular region in East Asia consisting of the Korean Peninsula, Jeju Island, and smaller islands. Since the end of World War II in 1945, it has been politically Division of Korea, divided at or near the 38th parallel north, 3 ...

or Samsung R'MIX in

France France, officially the French Republic, is a country located primarily in Western Europe. Overseas France, Its overseas regions and territories include French Guiana in South America, Saint Pierre and Miquelon in the Atlantic Ocean#North Atlan ...

because of its DJ feature) is a

portable media player A portable media player (PMP) or digital audio player (DAP) is a portable consumer electronics device capable of storing and playing digital media such as audio, images, and video files. Normally they refer to small, Electric battery, batter ...

made by

Samsung Samsung Group (; stylised as SΛMSUNG) is a South Korean Multinational corporation, multinational manufacturing Conglomerate (company), conglomerate headquartered in the Samsung Town office complex in Seoul. The group consists of numerous a ...

, first leaked on the webshop play.com on June 14, 2009 and then released at the end of September 2009. It was developed along with the YP-R0 with which it shares several specifications (similar aluminum design, same

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

kernel and SoC). The R1 is available in four different

Flash memory Flash memory is an Integrated circuit, electronic Non-volatile memory, non-volatile computer memory storage medium that can be electrically erased and reprogrammed. The two main types of flash memory, NOR flash and NAND flash, are named for t ...

capacities: 4 GB, 8 GB, 16 GB and 32 GB. It comes in three different colors: black, silver and pink. It features an aluminum case, a 2.6 inch

TFT LCD A thin-film-transistor liquid-crystal display (TFT LCD) is a type of liquid-crystal display that uses thin-film transistor, thin-film-transistor technology to improve image qualities such as addressability and contrast. A TFT LCD is an active mat ...

capacitive touchscreen A touchscreen (or touch screen) is a type of display that can detect touch input from a user. It consists of both an input device (a touch panel) and an output device (a visual display). The touch panel is typically layered on the top of the e ...

with a resolution of 240 by 400 pixels, a RDS

FM tuner In electronics and radio, a tuner is a type of receiver subsystem that receives RF transmissions, such as AM or FM broadcasts, and converts the selected carrier frequency into a form suitable for further processing or output, such as to a ...

bluetooth Bluetooth is a short-range wireless technology standard that is used for exchanging data between fixed and mobile devices over short distances and building personal area networks (PANs). In the most widely used mode, transmission power is li ...

(v2.0 + EDR) and a proprietary USB connector. Several EQ and sound effects are available through Samsung's ''DNSe 3.0'' sound engine.

Media support

* Audio codecs:

MP3 MP3 (formally MPEG-1 Audio Layer III or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III) is a coding format for digital audio developed largely by the Fraunhofer Society in Germany under the lead of Karlheinz Brandenburg. It was designed to greatly reduce the amount ...

, WMA,

WAV Waveform Audio File Format (WAVE, or WAV due to its filename extension; pronounced or ) is an audio file format standard for storing an audio bitstream on personal computers. The format was developed and published for the first time in 1991 ...

OGG Vorbis Vorbis is a free and open-source software project headed by the Xiph.Org Foundation. The project produces an audio coding format and software reference encoder/decoder (codec) for lossy audio compression, libvorbis. Vorbis is most common ...

AAC AAC may refer to: Aviation * Advanced Aircraft, a company from Carlsbad, California * Airborne aircraft carrier, a type of aircraft * Alaskan Air Command, a radar network * American Aeronautical Corporation, a company from Port Washington, New ...

-LC/Plus, RA and

FLAC FLAC (; Free Lossless Audio Codec) is an audio coding format for lossless compression of digital audio, developed by the Xiph.Org Foundation, and is also the name of the free software project producing the FLAC tools, the reference software ...

. * Video codecs:

DivX DIVX (Digital Video Express) is a discontinued digital video format. Created in part by Circuit City, it was an unsuccessful attempt to create an alternative to video rental in the United States. The format's poor reception from consumers resu ...

, Xvid,

MPEG-4 MPEG-4 is a group of international standards for the compression of digital audio and visual data, multimedia systems, and file storage formats. It was originally introduced in late 1998 as a group of audio and video coding formats and related ...

, H.264, WMV9 in

AVI Avi is a given name, usually masculine, often a diminutive of Avram (given name), Avram, Avraham, etc. It is sometimes feminine and a diminutive of the Hebrew spelling of Abigail (name), Abigail. People with the given name include: * Avi (author ...

/SVI/ MP4/ WMV/ ASF/ MOV containers. Video files up to resolution 720x480 are natively supported so in most cases converting is not necessary. * Picture formats: JPG, BMP, PNG,

GIF The Graphics Interchange Format (GIF; or , ) is a Raster graphics, bitmap Image file formats, image format that was developed by a team at the online services provider CompuServe led by American computer scientist Steve Wilhite and released ...

* Other: TXT and SWF files

Operation

The Samsung R1 is compatible with

Microsoft Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

and

Mac OS X macOS, previously OS X and originally Mac OS X, is a Unix, Unix-based operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple since 2001. It is the current operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. With ...

when USB mode is set to MSC as a

drag and drop In computer graphical user interfaces, drag and drop is a pointing device gesture in which the user (computing), user selects a virtual object by "grabbing" it and dragging it to a different location or onto another virtual object. In general, i ...

USB mass storage device. The player can also function as a Windows Media 10 and up device when USB mode is set to MTP. The R1 is the last Samsung MP3 player to have this proprietary USB connector (first introduced end of 2006 on the YP-K5). Newer devices have a standard

microUSB The initial versions of the USB standard specified connectors that were easy to use and that would have high life spans; revisions of the standard added smaller connectors useful for compact portable devices. Higher-speed development of the USB ...

connector. Besides the touchscreen, it also has 3 physical keys (power/hold, volume up, volume down). The R1 only powers fully off after several hours not being used or when pressing the reset hole. The rest of the time it only switches to a

sleep mode Sleep mode (or suspend to RAM) is a low power mode for electronic devices such as computers, televisions, and remote controlled devices. These modes save significantly on electrical consumption compared to leaving a device fully on and, upon resu ...

. Samsung claims up to 25 hours of music playback (with MP3 128 kbit/s files, volume level 15, normal sound mode and display off) and 5 hours of video playback (SVI, brightness 3, volume level 15, normal sound mode). The R1 features an icon and widget based

TouchWiz TouchWiz is a discontinued user interface developed by Samsung Electronics with partners, featuring a full touch user interface. It is sometimes incorrectly referred to as an operating system. TouchWiz was used internally by Samsung for smartphon ...

user interface developed in landscape mode. However it is possible to rotate the "Now Playing" screen to portrait mode.

Special features

Bluetooth

The YP-R1 has a

2.0 + EDR chip which supports several profiles including A2DP, AVRCP, HFP, Object Push etc... As a result, it is possible to receive and emit phone calls on the R1 over bluetooth, to send and receive files or to listen to music with a stereo bluetooth headset.

Beat DJ

Marketed as a major feature, especially in France where the commercial name R'MIX comes from, the DJ feature was often viewed as superfluous by the reviewers and users. This feature allows the user to scratch and apply several DJ filters and pre-recorded samples on a music track. The final result cannot be saved though. This feature was first introduced on the Samsung Platine/Beat DJ mobile phone a few months ago.

Other features

The R1 has four embedded games (Bubble Bang, Sudoku Champ, AstroRanger and WiseStar) and also supports SWF flash games and applications. It also has a voice recorder and a TV line-out using a 3.5mm to

RCA RCA Corporation was a major American electronics company, which was founded in 1919 as the Radio Corporation of America. It was initially a patent pool, patent trust owned by General Electric (GE), Westinghouse Electric Corporation, Westinghou ...

cable.

Software

No additional CD is shipped with the R1 but the optional software ''EmoDio'' can be found in the device's internal memory or can be downloaded from the official Samsung website. ''EmoDio'' (discontinued, now replaced by '' Kies'') is able to sync one's library with the R1, convert video files, manage playlists, rip CDs etc.. Samsung YP-R1 Rockbox

Samsung original firmware

Samsung released 9 firmware versions, from v1.09 to the latest one, v3.07, released on October 26, 2010. Most of them are only bug fixes releases but Samsung also released two major updates adding or improving features. The first one is v2.00 released on November 24, 2009. which made the overall UI, the coverflow and pictures scroll smoother. It also added two flash games. Then the v3.00 released on December 27, 2009 added the premium fonts and UCI support (in Korea only, the user needs a Korean ID and banking account to pay and download) and SDK 3.0 UCI support (User Created Interface: main menu customization for which the new SDK 3.0 gives more possibilities). It also made the coverflow and videos scroll still smoother. But the most awaited improvement was the playing time with ''DNSe'' sound effects enabled. Indeed, while the audio battery life with ''DNSe'' disabled is more than 20 hours, with ''DNSe'' enabled it was only about 8 hours. With firmware v3.00 this was improved to 12.5 hours. Like the YP-R0, the R1 is infamous for its many bugs, especially the library update one: when adding new files into the player's internal memory, it automatically updates the media library after disconnecting the device from the computer. It sometimes occurs that due to some specific audio files, the updating process hangs up, leading to brick the device. It is then no longer recognized by the computer and can no longer start up. Samsung released several firmware updates to fix this bug but never managed to find all root causes. As a result, the issue may occur even with the latest firmware v3.07. A preventive solution is to install a modded firmware or Rockbox (see below). Otherwise the user has to send his device back to the after-sales service center or use the leaked recovery tool. Unlike the older Samsung players which had a specific firmware for every region, on R1 the region code can be changed independently from the firmware (meaning that the firmware is the same worldwide). Each region code (KR, EU, FR, RU, US etc...) has it owns specificities like RDS support, lyrics support, MSC only or MSC/ MTP setting etc...

Alternative firmware

Following the success of YP-R0 modded firmware, the Italian developer also worked on a modded firmware for YP-R1. This modded v4.00 based on the official v3.07 was released on September 15, 2011. Compared to the official firmware v3.07 it adds a "Safe Mode" (the device can be connected to the computer even when bricked), a DRK (Device Rescue Kit) to unbrick the device, a CPU downclocking tool to save battery life and the possibility to customize the firmware's resources (pictures, sounds, fonts, language). Since early 2013 the alternative

free and open-source Free and open-source software (FOSS) is software available under a Software license, license that grants users the right to use, modify, and distribute the software modified or not to everyone free of charge. FOSS is an inclusive umbrella term ...

firmware In computing Computing is any goal-oriented activity requiring, benefiting from, or creating computer, computing machinery. It includes the study and experimentation of algorithmic processes, and the development of both computer hardware, h ...

Rockbox Rockbox is a free and open-source software replacement for the OEM firmware in various forms of digital audio players (DAPs) with an original kernel. It offers an alternative to the player's operating system, in many cases without removing the o ...

can be installed on the YP-R1. Unlike most usual Rockbox targets, the YP-R1 port is not a native port. It runs as an application based on the original

kernel used by Samsung in the official firmware. That makes the development easier but on the downside, Rockbox boots up slower as on the other usual targets. As of December 2013, the YP-R1 port is available as a separate patch and has not been merged into the Rockbox source code yet. The user has to compile the Rockbox bootloader himself or to use a pre-built dualboot modded firmware including the Rockbox bootloader.''Porting Rockbox to YP-R1'' thread on anythingbutipod
/ref> Compared to the Samsung original firmware, Rockbox supports more audio codecs and

gapless playback Gapless playback is the uninterrupted playback of consecutive audio tracks, such that relative time distances in the original audio source are preserved over track boundaries on playback. For this to be useful, other artifacts (than timing-related ...

among other things.

References

{{reflist

External links

Samsung YP-R1 product page on the official Samsung US websiteSamsung YP-R1 subforum on anythingbutipod.comSamsung Open Source Center
Digital audio players Portable media players Computer-related introductions in 2009