Samsung YH-920 GS Review

Overall Rating

Sleek, good looking unit with a case, headphones, charger, 2.0 USB lead, and most of all a large 20GB capacity.

Stores songs alphabetically. To play an album in order you have to go to the artist, then album, and then you can play it in the correct order.

I have a PC, and can use it for fairly basic functions (writing letters etc...) but I am not very technically minded, and when I read a load of specifications etc... about a product, a lot of them go over my head. (I genuinely had no idea what ripping and synching were 5 days ago)! So when my wife got me a Sumsung YH-920 MP3 player for my birthday, I was a little apprehensive about how it worked. I had a check on the internet and read many terrible reviews of the product. Reviews from people who were "computer literate" and found this awful, and useless, and unusable. This really got me worried, and I thought that I had got a real turkey of a player, and that with my limited knowledge I may not be able to use it at all.

When I started to use it I took note of what the reviews had said and didn't even attempt to use the Napster software. I had no real desire to download music from Napster anyway. I was much more interested in putting my CD collection on it. Despite my lack of technical knowledge, I have to say I found this very very easy to do.

I upgraded my Windows Media Player from version 9 to version 10, and started ripping Cd's into my PC. I had never done this before, but WMP 10 made this very easy, and I experienced no problems. I am happy to say that I also had no problems synching the music from my PC to the YH-920. As I did not previously have any Cd's on my PC, I started off doing a batch of around 20 Cd's, ripping them and then synching them. In WMP 10's library there is a Sync panel on the right hand side. This can be expanded by dragging it over. Then it was as easy as dragging an album title (or an artist, then ALL their albums get copied over) from the library into the Sync panel. Once I had many albums ready to be synched, I clicked the sync tab and was given a list of everything ready to be synched. Then it was as easy as clicking start sync, and everything was copied onto the YH-920.

I now have over 100 albums on my unit (I'm putting on albums as fast as family life will allow), and I still have over 10GB free! The player itself is easy to use, although it is slightly annoying that you can't play an album in the correct order unless you go in through artist first, then album. Any album with various artists can be annoying, as it lists each artist individually, even though you may only have one song by them on the player. You can still listen to the album, but because you can't go into artist first, you have to listen to it alphabetically! But other than these very minor complaints, it has been a joy to use, and I now wonder how I survived so long without an MP3 player.

Initially I was put off by the many bad reviews I read about this machine. Most of these problems seem to come from trying to use the Napster software. I would advise not to do this, and use WMP 10 (although I read WMP 9 also works) to get your MP3's onto the player. I have read a couple of people saying that WMP 10 would not work with this machine. I can't say why this happened to these people, but my own experience is completely different, and WMP 10 is working perfectly for me. One other thing emerged when investigating the YH-920 over the internet, and that was when I check only UK sites, the majority of reviews were bad, but on checking US sites, this player gets very very good reviews. I'm sorry so many people have had difficulties, because from my experiences this is a very good player with a large memory.