Gerall’s Blog

My wife has purchased a new mp3 player, the Samsung YP-P2 8gb. It’s a cool little gadget (native A2DP Bluetooth, mp4 video capable, pictures, touch screen, etc, etc). Unfortunately, out of the box it only speaks MTP. My lovely wife’s PC boots a Debian GNOME desktop, which only groks UMS. What’s a bald hacker to do?

What’s the difference between MTP and UMS?

MTP is the Media Transfer Protocol. It is proprietary to Microsoft. Plug your device into a Windows box, and it shows up in Explorer and Windows Media Player. This protocol allows the device to use WMP as it’s own iTunes; only Windows Media Player understands how to put tracks onto the device, write playlists that grok where they are, etc.

UMS stands for “USB Mass Storage“, and is what allows your device to show up as a drive under the three predominant OSs: Windows, Mac, and Linux. Much like a thumb drive, UMS provides the storage medium to the operating system. The job of sorting and organizing your music is up to you, because the OS has no preconceived role for the device. Using UMS, it’s just another drive available to the system.

To change the connection protocol, we follow these really excellent instructions on flashing the firmware. During the flashing process, we sneak in a configuration mod to make the device change it’s region (I chose EU due to various supported features in that region) and how it connects to other systems. Now, it’s just a matter of Suzanne taking the device and plugging it in. It’ll show up as any other flash-drive and she can copy her tunes to it as she did with her much-missed iriver clix.

It should be noted that you do give up a certain level of utility going from one version of the transfer protocol to another. MTP sorts and organizes without your intervention. It also manages playlists automatically.

On the downside, it’s a gnarly, proprietary thing. Probably written in Visual Basic 5.0… Disgusting!

While UMS requires you to do the organizational aspect of syncing your tunes to the player, I don’t know of any FOSS geek who doesn’t already have a strangle hold on their music files and their tags. Besides, when any new OS comes along and groks the UMS protocol, that’s just another platform that the hardware vendor can sell to.

Thanks for reading - I’m keeping the links above handy here for my own use. However, if you get use out of them, all the better.

Tags: Technical //