I've looked through the CVS repo and noticed that this project has been inactive lately. I'm a developer interested in libnetmd development and would like to know what its status is.
Have the developers hit some fundamental roadblock in development that's preventing progress, or is continued effort still worth while?
Thanks,
ekimd
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
Indeed the project is not actively being developed anymore. The last significant update was a streamlining of the USB communication layer.
Personally, I think the current functionality is nice but not very useful. Obviously the 'killer app' would be functionality to exchange actual music files between PC and NetMD (rather than just simple tracklist edits). Unfortunately all music transfers are encrypted and Sony apparently did a pretty good job at encryption since so far it is still uncracked.
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
How far did you guys get on cracking encryption? Did you look into that or not? I'm currently on my first steps of reverse engineering, I have a few tools that are helping me understand logs etc and hopefully I will be able to provide some helpful code sooner or later...
Are there any thoughts on the encryption used? Is it key based? Symetrical, asymetrical? Just wondering how much you know :)
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
Just on the off chance anyone looks at this.
(please keep in mind I'm wiping off years of dust from these memories)
The core problem is
1) people good at this tend to work on other things
2) people OK at this need to be warry of the DMCA
As the original author of this project the reason the project died in the first place is that the active authors where very warry of doing anything surrounding the encrytpion aspect (not to mention it was way over my head)
We had at one point managed to transfer a blank (all 0's) track but I don't think the official sources ever offered this functionality as it used tons of hardcoded contstraints to achieve this.
The issue was really a few things. the atrac3/omg format and the upload format.
You had to be able to generate content that was compatible and the uploaded (to the netmd device) data used a encrypted channel (the data transfered was different from the data on the disk).
Anyone willing to take a wack at it just has to install the sony software and review the components that it installs to achieve this functionality (something for the windows cryptography services).
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
Indeed it seems that Sony did their homework with the encryption, probably not uncrackable but certainly not trivial. There is a Sony patent that basically describes the encryption process, how keys are managed and such but it does not say anything about keys sizes and which encryption algorithm is used.
I think there was one mode (SP?) where the MD did the encoding instead of the PC. In this mode the amount of data transferred to the MD was about the same size as the raw wave data. So getting something to work in this mode, would probably not require knowledge of the atrac/omg format.
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
Now that you mentioned it, yes there was a direct disc transfer utility that did convert the audio to atrac3 and sent that data direct to the minidisc.
real time and the most uncompressed version of the format where 2 reasons not many people used this.
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
I've looked through the CVS repo and noticed that this project has been inactive lately. I'm a developer interested in libnetmd development and would like to know what its status is.
Have the developers hit some fundamental roadblock in development that's preventing progress, or is continued effort still worth while?
Thanks,
ekimd
Indeed the project is not actively being developed anymore. The last significant update was a streamlining of the USB communication layer.
Personally, I think the current functionality is nice but not very useful. Obviously the 'killer app' would be functionality to exchange actual music files between PC and NetMD (rather than just simple tracklist edits). Unfortunately all music transfers are encrypted and Sony apparently did a pretty good job at encryption since so far it is still uncracked.
How far did you guys get on cracking encryption? Did you look into that or not? I'm currently on my first steps of reverse engineering, I have a few tools that are helping me understand logs etc and hopefully I will be able to provide some helpful code sooner or later...
Are there any thoughts on the encryption used? Is it key based? Symetrical, asymetrical? Just wondering how much you know :)
Just on the off chance anyone looks at this.
(please keep in mind I'm wiping off years of dust from these memories)
The core problem is
1) people good at this tend to work on other things
2) people OK at this need to be warry of the DMCA
As the original author of this project the reason the project died in the first place is that the active authors where very warry of doing anything surrounding the encrytpion aspect (not to mention it was way over my head)
We had at one point managed to transfer a blank (all 0's) track but I don't think the official sources ever offered this functionality as it used tons of hardcoded contstraints to achieve this.
The issue was really a few things. the atrac3/omg format and the upload format.
You had to be able to generate content that was compatible and the uploaded (to the netmd device) data used a encrypted channel (the data transfered was different from the data on the disk).
Anyone willing to take a wack at it just has to install the sony software and review the components that it installs to achieve this functionality (something for the windows cryptography services).
Hi Marc,
Indeed it seems that Sony did their homework with the encryption, probably not uncrackable but certainly not trivial. There is a Sony patent that basically describes the encryption process, how keys are managed and such but it does not say anything about keys sizes and which encryption algorithm is used.
I think there was one mode (SP?) where the MD did the encoding instead of the PC. In this mode the amount of data transferred to the MD was about the same size as the raw wave data. So getting something to work in this mode, would probably not require knowledge of the atrac/omg format.
Now that you mentioned it, yes there was a direct disc transfer utility that did convert the audio to atrac3 and sent that data direct to the minidisc.
real time and the most uncompressed version of the format where 2 reasons not many people used this.