Samsung YP-K3

I bought the MP3-player "Samsung YP-K3" a few days ago. Here I want to report about my experiences I made on using the K3 on my Linux system.

History

2008-03-30: A method for upgrading the firmware version 3.09 to Korean firmwares 4.xx has become public.

New firmware

Upgrading the Samsung K3 to the Korean firmware versions 4.xx has several advantages, including:

USB mass storage support instead of using the MTP protocol. This is very useful when using Linux or Mac OS.
No need for ID3 tags - directory structure is used instead.
File browser is included.
ogg file support.
Text file support.
Currently, one player (out of two) didn't worked at two Windows systems (out of three) at my own experience. The player wasn't correctly recognized and there was a problem with an ini file. Obviously, dropping the MTP stuff resolves that kind of problems.

At first, upgrading a K3 with a firmware version 3.09 was not able. But these days a new method has become public, exploiting the boot mode of the K3 to load a firmware in RAM. You can find a step-by-step description at anythingbutipod.com.

MTP

If you are using a 3.xx firmware, you need MTP support. One possible MTP implementation uses FUSE and can be installed on a Gentoo system as follows:

emerge fuse libmtp

To copy/delete songs, pictures, etc. to/from the K3, I installed the mtpfs package. Gentoos portage does not contain this package, hence I downloaded the source archive and a simple

make
make install

as superuser did it. The Gentoo wiki of the K3 contains an explanation to use a 3rd party ebuild. Now, we can mount the k3 and alter the content by something like

mkdir /mnt/k3
mtpfs /mnt/k3
cp/mv/rm ...
fusermount -u /mnt/k3

Interesstingly, I was able to copy non-jpg and non-mp3 files as well. As I think I could remember, this was not possible when using the Windows Explorer for copying, which I tested before all that.

ID3 Tags

However, the most annoying for me was the damn ID3 tag usage. Many MP3s one has on a hard disk may not contain ID3-tags. Fortunately, Linux users have a bash where they can change/set ID3 tags on a large amount of files systematically. Lets say, you have a directory called "AlbumX" containing the corresponding mp3-files. Save the following script as "id3Fn2Song.sh"

"Set song title based on file name" - script

#!/bin/bash

STRIP=${1%.mp3}
SONG=${STRIP//_/ }
id3v2 --song "$SONG" "$1"

and call IFS=$'\n'; for i in `ls *.mp3`; do id3Fn2Song.sh "$i"; done to set the the song title of all those mp3s based on the filename. Often, there are mp3s with filenames like "artist - song.mp3". In this case you could use a script like the following:

"Set song title and artist based on file name" - script

#!/bin/bash
 
STRIP=${1%.mp3} 
STRIP=${STRIP//_/ } 
 
ARTIST=${STRIP% -*} 
ARTIST=${ARTIST//_/ } 
SONG=${STRIP#*- } 
SONG=${SONG//_/ } 
 
if [ -f "$1" ]; 
then 
	id3v2 --song "$SONG" --artist "$ARTIST" "$1" 
else 
	echo "file does not exist" 
fi

To set the album or the genre for a whole directory a simple call like "id3v2 --album "AlbumX" *.mp3" works as well. This section does not intend to be complete. You may easily think of ways to extend and modify the scripts above.

Conclusion

The Samsung K3 is a very decent MP3 player (and my first one). Using the K3 with a 3.xx firmware is fine, but since the Korean firmware is available again, I enjoy the K3 even more.