Samsung YP-T6 MP3 Player

In April 2005, I bought a Samsung YP-T6 MP3 player.  Below you'll find a couple of photos which show just how tiny it is.  About the size of thumb!

The YP-T6 comes in various memory sizes and mine is the 512Mb model.  Depending on how you encode your music, and the length of the songs, it'll vary on how many songs you can load.  At this moment, mine has around 100 songs on it and is pretty full.  Most of my recordings are VBR, so I can confirm it plays VBR with no problems.  It is apparently one of the few players that will handle WMA, OGG, WAV and Secure WMA, too.

If you get tired of listening to whatever you put on your player, you can listen to the built-in FM radio.  It can store quite a few pre-sets so you can always find your favorite stations.

If listening isn't enough, you can also record!  It has a built-in microphone, which I experimented a little with.  It recorded speech fine.  I tried it with live music and it was very distorted even though the music wasn't all that loud.  Perhaps an external mic would work better?

The Samsung can also record the built-in FM radio.  Plus, it even has an external input jack for recording other sources straight to MP3 (no, I haven't tried it yet).  If you're wondering what bit rate it uses for recording, well, you get to choose between several settings varying from 32 to 128 kbps.  It even has a silence detector to automatically split recordings into several files (yes, you can turn this feature off).

It does support play lists.  I haven't used this feature, but you apparently go through and mark the songs you want in the list and it saves it.  I think you can have several lists, but wouldn't swear to it.  It also has various sound settings so you can set it however you like.

The display is three lines.  The middle is the largest and usually scrolls left and right to show the song you're listening to.  The top line shows the mode you're in and such.  The bottom line is generally a little bar graph showing how far along the current song is.

The top has four buttons labeled "REC", "A to B", "Play/Pause" and "HOLD."  Well, actually a couple use symbols which are easily understood.  About the only one that I think needs explaining is the "hold" button.  Flip it and it keeps you from accidentally turning on the player while it's in your pocket.

There's another control on the front.  Kind of a little joystick thingie.  Use it to adjust the volume, pick songs, fast-forward, rewind, activate the menu, etc.  The manual wasn't clear about an important feature of this control.  People have even written to me because they had trouble, too.  It's obvious that you can move it up, down, left and right.  What is less obvious is that it clicks inward.  Put your finger on the top and press straight down on the top.  Just like you were going to push the stick down inside the player.  Well, you don't press it that hard but it will click to let you know.  Hold it a couple of seconds and a menu will appear.  This will let you make tons of settings and access the FM radio.

The YP-T6 run on a AAA battery.  They claim 20 hours but I've yet to get that much.  The alkaline battery that came with the player might've gotten 14.  I used one of my old NiCads and got 3 or 4 hours.  I just tried a brand new Energizer nickel metal hydride which had a better life rating than any other in the store.  It gave me around 10 hours.  Buy a pack of four for around $10 and they'll get you through a 40-hour work week!

I replaced the included headphones.  They sounded okay but had a tendency to fall out of my ears.  From the manual, it appears you should buy 16 ohm replacements, so be sure to confirm that before purchasing a new set.  Look for the number "16" followed by a little symbol that kinda looks like a horseshoe.

The Samsung comes with two methods of hooking up to your computer.  One is a standard USB cable.  The other also uses the USB port but is much tinier.  It's just a connecter with a USB plug on each end.  No cable.  Just a little 2" long thing.

Oh yeah, you can also use the Samsung as a little flash drive to store computer files on.  You'd have to take the little connector along or have access to a USB cable, though.

So far, I love the Samsung.  Sounds great.  Tiny.  Pretty easy to operate.  Lots of nice features.

Amazon doesn't list the player yet, but they do have the YP-MT6Z which looks similar.

UPDATE:  If your songs don't play in the correct order, it seems the Samsung likes for the file names to begin with a number (such as 01, 02, etc).  Also, put each album into a separate folder.  Otherwise, it won't play an entire album at once.  Instead, it will play the first song from every album and then the second from each.

UPDATE #2:  Initially my Samsung would play one folder of songs and then automatically move on to the next.  Mysteriously it quit operating in this manner and would stop after each folder.  I never found a setting that fixed it, but did find another method.  After connecting the player to your computer, go its folder (in "My Computer").  Then, delete the "settings.dat" file.  Your player will automatically create and new fresh file.  On the downside, you lose any settings you made (like power-off time and tag-use display, etc).  I figure you can get your settings just like you want and then back up the file to your computer.  If the problem repeats, just copy the file back to the Samsung.

UPDATE #3:  Everybody apparently hates the manual!  Several people have written to me that haven't been able to figure out how to copy songs to the Samsung.  I just hook it to my USB port (use the cable because the little dongle thingie will tear the cover off after a while).  It will then appear as a new drive under "My Computer."  Then just drag and drop your music to it.  I like to put each album in a different folder, myself.  I believe you can also use Windows Media Player.  The secret would be the "Sync" tab near the top of the screen.

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