The Samsung YP-R0 (also known as Samsung R0 worldwide or Yepp R0 in

Korea Korea ( ko, 한국, or , ) is a peninsular region in East Asia. Since 1945, it has been divided at or near the 38th parallel, with North Korea (Democratic People's Republic of Korea) comprising its northern half and South Korea (Republic o ...

or Samsung R'PLAY in

France France (), officially the French Republic ( ), is a country primarily located in Western Europe. It also comprises of Overseas France, overseas regions and territories in the Americas and the Atlantic Ocean, Atlantic, Pacific Ocean, Pac ...

) is a

portable media player A portable media player (PMP) (also including the related digital audio player (DAP)) is a portable consumer electronics device capable of storing and playing digital media such as audio, images, and video files. The data is typically stored o ...

made by

Samsung The Samsung Group (or simply Samsung) ( ko, 삼성 ) is a South Korean multinational manufacturing conglomerate headquartered in Samsung Town, Seoul, South Korea. It comprises numerous affiliated businesses, most of them united under the ...

, leaked on August 10, 2009 and first released end of October 2009 in Russia. It was developed along with the

YP-R1 The Samsung YP-R1 (also known as Samsung R1 worldwide or Yepp R1 in Korea or Samsung R'MIX in France because of its DJ feature) is a portable media player made by Samsung, first leaked on the webshop play.com on June 14, 2009 and then released at ...

with which it shares several specifications (similar aluminum design, same

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which ...

kernel and SoC). The R0 is available in three different

Flash memory Flash memory is an electronic 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 the NOR and NAND logic gates. Both us ...

capacities: 4 GB, 8 GB, and 16 GB. It comes in three different colors: black, silver and pink. Storage is expandable via a

microSDHC Secure Digital, officially abbreviated as SD, is a proprietary non-volatile flash memory card format developed by the SD Association (SDA) for use in portable devices. The standard was introduced in August 1999 by joint efforts between SanDis ...

slot with capacity up to 32 GB, and unofficially to 64GB or more via

FAT32 File Allocation Table (FAT) is a file system developed for personal computers. Originally developed in 1977 for use on floppy disks, it was adapted for use on hard disks and other devices. It is often supported for compatibility reasons by c ...

formatted

SDXC Secure Digital, officially abbreviated as SD, is a proprietary non-volatile flash memory card format developed by the SD Association (SDA) for use in portable devices. The standard was introduced in August 1999 by joint efforts between SanDis ...

cards. It features an aluminum case, a 2.6 inch

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

display with a resolution of 240 by 320 pixels, RDS

FM tuner A tuner is a subsystem that receives radio frequency (RF) transmissions, such as FM broadcasting, and converts the selected carrier frequency and its associated bandwidth into a fixed frequency that is suitable for further processing, usually be ...

, tactile buttons and

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

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, with support from other digital scientists in the United States and elsewhere. Origin ...

, WMA,

WAV Waveform Audio File Format (WAVE, or WAV due to its filename extension; pronounced "wave") is an audio file format standard, developed by IBM and Microsoft, for storing an audio bitstream on PCs. It is the main format used on Microsoft Win ...

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. Vorbis is most commonly used in conjun ...

AAC AAC may refer to: Aviation * Advanced Aircraft, a company from Carlsbad, California * Alaskan Air Command, a radar network * American Aeronautical Corporation, a company from Port Washington, New York * American Aviation, a company from Cleveland, ...

-LC/Plus 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 p ...

. * Video codecs: DivX,

Xvid Xvid (formerly "XviD") is a video codec library following the MPEG-4 video coding standard, specifically MPEG-4 Part 2 Advanced Simple Profile (ASP). It uses ASP features such as b-frames, global and quarter pixel motion compensation, lumi mas ...

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 tec ...

H.264 Advanced Video Coding (AVC), also referred to as H.264 or MPEG-4 Part 10, is a video compression standard based on block-oriented, motion-compensated coding. It is by far the most commonly used format for the recording, compression, and distri ...

WMV9 Windows Media Video (WMV) is a series of video codecs and their corresponding video coding formats developed by Microsoft. It is part of the Windows Media framework. WMV consists of three distinct codecs: The original video compression technology ...

AVI Avi is a given name, usually masculine, often a diminutive of Avram, Avraham, etc. It is sometimes feminine and a diminutive of the Hebrew spelling of Abigail. People with the given name include: * Avi (born 1937), Newbery award-winning Americ ...

/SVI/ MP4/

WMV Windows Media Video (WMV) is a series of video codecs and their corresponding video coding formats developed by Microsoft. It is part of the Windows Media framework. WMV consists of three distinct codecs: The original video compression technology ...

ASF ASF may refer to: Arts and entertainment * Alabama Shakespeare Festival, a drama festival * ''Asimov's Science Fiction'', a U.S.-based English-language science fiction magazine containing SF stories Science and technology Biological * A ...

/ MOV containers. Video files up to resolution 720x480 are natively supported so in most cases converting is not necessary. * Picture formats:

JPG JPEG ( ) is a commonly used method of lossy compression for digital images, particularly for those images produced by digital photography. The degree of compression can be adjusted, allowing a selectable tradeoff between storage size and image ...

, BMP, PNG,

GIF The Graphics Interchange Format (GIF; or , see pronunciation) is a bitmap image format that was developed by a team at the online services provider CompuServe led by American computer scientist Steve Wilhite and released on 15 June 1987. ...

* Other: TXT files

Operation

The Samsung R0 is compatible with

Microsoft Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...

and

Mac OS X macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. Within the market of ...

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 selects a virtual object by "grabbing" it and dragging it to a different location or onto another virtual object. In general, it can be used to i ...

USB mass storage device The USB mass storage device class (also known as USB MSC or UMS) is a set of computing communications protocols, specifically a USB Device Class, defined by the USB Implementers Forum that makes a USB device accessible to a host computing device ...

. The player can also function as a Windows Media 10 and up device when USB mode is set to MTP. Unlike many Samsung players, the R0 features a standard

connector. It also has 9 physical keys (power/hold, back, menu, user button, select, up, down, left, right) but neither hardware ''hold'' key nor dedicated volume buttons. The R0 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 30 hours of music playback (with MP3 128kbit/s files, volume level 15, normal sound mode and display off) and 6 hours of video playback (SVI, brightness 3, volume level 15, normal sound mode).

Software

No additional CD is shipped with the R0 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 R0, convert video files, manage playlists, rip CDs etc.. Samsung YP-R0 collection

Samsung original firmware

Samsung released 10 firmware revisions, from v1.03 to the latest one, v1.25, released on May 11, 2011. The firmware was only released to fix bugs but not to add or improve features. Indeed, only the UCI (User Created Interface: main menu customization) and premium fonts (in Korea only) support have been added via a new firmware. The YP-R0 is infamous for its many bugs, especially the library update one: when adding new files into the internal memory of the player, 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 R0. 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 v1.25. 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 R0 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 MSC may refer to: Computers * Message Sequence Chart * Microelectronics Support Centre of UK Rutherford Appleton Laboratory * MIDI Show Control * MSC Malaysia (formerly known as Multimedia Super Corridor) * USB mass storage device class (USB MSC ...

only or

/ MTP setting etc...

Alternative firmware

On July 7, 2011 the first modded firmware v2.00 based on the official firmware v1.25 was released by an Italian developer. Modded firmware releases v2.10 and v2.20 came out later. Compared to the official firmware v1.25, they add 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 resources (pictures, sounds, fonts, language) of the firmware. Since 2011 the alternative

free and open-source Free and open-source software (FOSS) is a term used to refer to groups of software consisting of both free software and open-source software where anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way, and the source ...

firmware In computing, firmware is a specific class of computer software that provides the low-level control for a device's specific hardware. Firmware, such as the BIOS of a personal computer, may contain basic functions of a device, and may provide 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 or ...

can be installed on the YP-R0. Unlike most usual Rockbox targets, the YP-R0 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-R0 is an ''unstable port'' according to the official Rockbox classification. In fact, it runs well enough for a daily use but cannot be installed via ''Rockbox Utility'' yet. The user has to compile the Rockbox bootloader himself or to use a pre-built modded firmware including the Rockbox bootloader such as modded firmware v2.51 (dualboot) or lightROM 4.6 (Rockbox only).''Porting Rockbox to YP-R0'' thread on anythingbutipod
/ref> Contrary to the Samsung firmware, Rockbox merges the internal memory and the

microSD Secure Digital, officially abbreviated as SD, is a proprietary non-volatile flash memory card format developed by the SD Association (SDA) for use in portable devices. The standard was introduced in August 1999 by joint efforts between SanDis ...

card into the same tags library, 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 o ...

among other things.

References

{{reflist

External links

Samsung YP-R0 product page on the official Samsung US websiteSamsung YP-R0 subforum on anythingbutipod.comSamsung Open Source Center
Digital audio players Portable media players Computer-related introductions in 2009