Battleangel | Personal

I finally decided on a DAP. After much deliberation, I came to conclusion that there will never be a perfect player in a sensible price range. One of the candidate models happened to be on sale and so one thing led to another.

I chose the Samsung 4GB YP-Z5F mainly for its wholesome build quality and features. Features like 44 hours playback (up from 35 in the last firmware), OGG support, radio, a reasonable screen, good transfer speeds (more like average, but could have been a lot worse), UMS support (MTS too of course), commendable audio clarity and album art support. Plus it isn’t the smallest or lightest player on the market so it has a nice sturdy feel to it.

Cons: Proprietary battery obviously. No video support, not that it matters to me. Quirky navigation, even if you get used to it.

Album art

The first thing one should know about DAPs is that they generally don’t like the meta data that is stored by various applications, like Photoshop. Either you “save for the web” or you have to semi-automatically strip the files.

• JPEG and PNG Stripper A nifty tool to remove meta data from images.
• Album art trouble with the Samsung YP-Z5 On how meta data JPEGs wont load.

More generally, I try to keep my “folder.jpg” images small, no more than 15kb / 200×200 or so. It is also of the utmost importance that the format is vanilla JPEG and no funky derivations AND that the image is in fact a perfect square. Thankfully, the Z5 works with album art even if you transfer your music in UMS mode.

Headphones, batteries and impedance

I obviously haven’t had time to really test the battery and playback time under real world conditions. Initially I was concerned that the Koss Porta Pro, which is a relatively high-impedance pair of headphones, would drain the battery much too quickly. And so I was reexamining the market, looking at models such as the AKG K24P and Sennheiser PX100 — models that are very similar to the Porta Pro, but more suitable for DAPs and to some extent with higher audio fidelity. I’ll keep it in mind at least.

Quirks?

By now, the Z5F is a fairly mature product with several firmware upgrades, but there are nevertheless some more or less severe nuisances, apart from the ones mentioned above. Of course, many aren’t terribly specific to Samsung or this particular model but they are nevertheless worth considering.

For one, the player comes preloaded with two songs and a bunch of wallpapers. I can see why having some content will make the player easier to showcase. But if it was a matter of making it look good, Samsung should really consider including a small selection of more interesting music. A few classical pieces and some K-Pop or whatever. The wallpapers strangely enough were not cropped to fit the 128 x 160 screen. Rather, they were huge, took ages to load, looked pixelated and some were just really poor selections to begin with. And like the album art, the Z5F doesn’t read more esoteric JPEG formats / settings … which is something I realized as I quickly made my own custom wallpapers.

Another quirk of sorts is the stand-by mode that is activated as you power off the player. It allows for a quick resume up to 24 h. The behavior is not user selectable. After 24 h, the player has to go through the tedious boot-up sequence all over again. And I find myself wanting more. On the one hand, it is not unusual to leave the player off for more than 24 h and so most of the time stand-by is just no good. On the other hand, the player is running on battery while it’s in stand-by and so there is a toll to this setting. Personally, I’d like to either be able to shut off the function or be able to extend it to a point where it is actually useful.

Configuring radio presets is a little difficult as well. What I would like is for the stations to be stored in a flat file on the player so that you can edit them manually while the player is connected to the computer. The automatic preset or the scan functions were pretty much crap as well. I had to look up the local frequencies for radio stations and then manually tune in to store the presets.

Another miscellaneous “quirk” is the lack of accessories for Samsung in general. Of course, compared to iCrap, pretty much every other player or brand is lacking in this department. Seen from the point of view of my geographical location, the Samsung speaker dock, the YA-DS100, is nowhere to be found and seems to have been already relegated to the dustbin despite being introduced in the second half of 2006. The same goes for the third party cases from Belkin that also came out in late 2006. Only three resellers in the whole of Sweden listed these cases and no one had them in stock upon closer examination. No other accessories are currently available in my neck of the woods and seeing as the player is basically discontinued, I doubt we’ll be seeing anything further from Samsung or 3rd parties.