The Yepp YP-MT6Z ships with a pair of nice ear bud headphones, in gray. The mini-headphone jack is gold plated, and the ear buds are economically shaped so they rest comfortably when you put them in.

The buds are a little longer than what we're used to seeing with portable music players, and while they do the job well, I'd be inclined to swap them out for a pair of good Sony ear buds.

The sound quality is on par with what you can expect from this style of headphones, which is more than satisfactory for running around. The cable is also a good length (~1.4m), so you can store the YP-MT6Z in a pocket and still have plenty of headphone cable to spare.

		When playing back tracks the back lit LCD display shows the track name in the standard scrolling manner. Scroll speed can be adjusted.		Users can adjust play mode, equalizer preferences, file and system settings display options.
		Navigating through the file directory is easy. MP3 are stored in folders or individually, with the file name visible.		The digital FM Radio will scan through the frequency, or you can set preset channels for quick indexing.

The Samsung Music Studio software comes bundled in with the CD full of USB drivers, YP-MT6Z memory formatting, and firmware updating programs. It's not much to get excited about though. The online help files indicate that Yepp Studio software offers music media playback and ripping functionality; it will create play lists like any standard player, but isn't all that intuitive to use.

Curiously, the ripping feature crashed our WinXP SP2 machine every time we tried it. I'd recommend using Audiograbber, it works, and is easy to get a grasp of. Samsung Music Studio suffers from iconitis.... in other words, all the controls are in icon form which is pretty meaningless to most of us.

The YP-MT6Z

Samsung's Yepp YP-MT6Z is a 1GB fixed memory portable MP3 player which offers up to 42hrs playback, and MP3 encoding at up to 128kbps of FM radio or connected audio on the fly. All this for a sticker price of about $230CDN ($180USD) is pretty sweet! A year ago, a 192MB MP3 player would have cost as much.

The small white YP-MT6Z has easy to use controls, and the white backlit LCD display is packed full of information in a decipherable and legible format.

Relying on one AA battery, the Samsung Yepp YP-MT6Z bridges together the worlds of USB hard drive and MP3 player to create something that easily accepts music in a variety of formats like Ogg Vorbis, and bit-rates.

The YP-MT6Z supports MP3s encoded at anywhere from 8-360kbps. ASF and WMA files of 8-192kbps are supported. Voice recordings are stored in WMA format. To be frank, the voice recording feature is no substitute for a good dedicated digital voice recorder though.

The digital FM tuner works well, but doesn't always do away with background static. The FM radio automatically shifts between stereo or mono, depending on the signal strength, but overall I'd have to give it good marks for fidelity. The auto scanning, and 20 station presets make jumping from station to station a quick task.

Of all the YP-MT6Z's features though, its 42 hour playback and AA power source are the biggest plusses for me. If you listen to a lot of music (with 1GB storage you certainly should) you'll find that the Samsung Yepp YP-MT6Z's low power costs are a blessing in the longrun. The expense of buying AAA batteries can really add up, whereas AA's are much more affordable, and in this case they also last that much longer.