The yampp is a portable home-build MP3 player -- or actually a series of them, designed by Jesper Hansen and friends. See the yampp web-site for more details. I have the yampp-7 unit, which is the portable version (see right). It uses a mobile phone battery for power, a compact flash card for storage, and a USB interface for uploading MP3s and recharging the battery. I chose not to add an LCD display to my version, because making neat holes in plastic casings isn't something I'm especially good at.

My eventual aim with this unit is to convert it into a portable binaural beat generator (see my SBaGen pages), but right now there is just my ylink tool available here:

ylink

The first step for me once I got it built, was to write some software to talk to the yampp from Linux over the USB interface. The drivers for the USB chip used in the yampp are already present in later Linux 2.4.* kernel source ("FTDI USB Serial Convertor"), so it only required software written to communicate with the yampp firmware.

So, my ylink tool is a simple Linux command-line tool equivalent to the yamppLink GUI software that Ulrich Behrenbeck wrote for Windows. There are a number of features missing from ylink (no ID or playlength information is picked up from the MP3, for instance), but it does handle multiple playlists. Thanks are due to Uli for helping me understand the YADL format and for providing some code examples.

Ylink is good enough for my purposes right now -- I can upload, download, list and delete MP3s, manage the playlists, and burn new firmware to the device. As my unit does not have an LCD, the lack of MP3 information does not matter too much to me. If anyone wants to take development further, please go ahead. The source is released under the GPL. I know that Uli is currently looking at improving the MP3 information for yamppLink, and he may pass some source over that I can incorporate in some form. Also, if you find bugs, let me know and I will see what I can do.

Please don't risk using this on your yampp unit unless you are willing to upload all the MP3s again if something goes wrong. I haven't had any problems, but I can't guarantee that you won't.

Download 'ylink' release ZIP files

I'm using ZIP files here instead of TGZ files so that Windows users can pick up the source to look at as well, if they wish.

These pages and files, including applets and artwork, are Copyright (c) 1997-2019 Jim Peters unless otherwise stated. Please contact me if you'd like to use anything not explicitly released, or if you have something interesting to discuss.