This is a work in progress (and most likely will always be so)!

Here is what I have been working on and looking for to aquip myself with. I wanted to keep working without any hassle on my daily stuff just as I ever had and with changes to come. But at the same time I needed to be sure for a situation where I needed older versions of my files — would it be due to a system or hard disk brake down or a file deleted erroneously or changes need to be undone — to just have them there by no more than one command away. To say in short I wanted a time machine for my files that just works™ — also in at least 5 years time. In the case of recreation of older versions I want to be able to focus on what to restore and not how. And also with previous backups I have had e.g. corrupted archive files or unreadable part files/CDs to many times (one is even to many) or I’ve had issues because of too old of a file format (mostly proprietary formats).

Here is what I’ve been looking for feature-wise generally:

• no expenses money-wise
• robust
• using only small and freely available tools — the more system core utils the better
• version control
• snapshot system
• remote storage
• private, i.e. secure data transmission over network and reliably encrypted storage
• suitable for mobility, independent of how I’m connected
• simple yet flexible usage

for daily backups:

• automation using cron
• no need for interaction
• easy and flexible declaration of files or folders to omit from backup

and for restoring data:

• just works™ (see above)
• fast and easy look up of what versions are available at best via a GUI like Timeline with filter options
• at very best some sort of offline functionality, e.g. caching of most likely (whatever that means) required older versions

(partly) Alternative solutions I have come across on the run

• Suns’ z file system (zfs): Haven’t had enough time to get it working with Ubuntu Linux (because of license issues not packaged, only working via FUSE so far). Need’s partition setup thus lavish. Not sure about networking/mobility demands, e.g. remote snapshot location nor ease of use.
• subversion together with svk: Easy and flexible to use and automate, version control per se, distributed and offline operations (svk). Contra: Recovery relays on subversion software, i.e. no cp or mv. Basic idea is to work on a copy: checkout before you start) and have daily automated commits. Should need no interactions since I’m the only one working with my “backup projects”. See this lengthy description.
• Coda file system: distributed file system with caching. Had not enough time to try out.
• rsnapshot: Has remote feature (ssh, rsync), automation, rotation. Relies on file systems using hard links within backup folder hierarchy for “non-incremental files” and runs as root only (system wide conf file, ssh configure issue, ssh-key, …). Workaround could be to use a specific group.
• sshfs: FUSE add on to use remote directories via ssh transparently.
• croned bash backup script using tar and gzip; daily incremental and monthly save “snapshot” similar to logrotate.
• grsync: gnome GUI for rsync optimized for (incremental) backups

Update 10/2009: A few weeks ago i stumbled upon Back In Time which has astonishingly many properties of what I expect from a perfect backup solution. It basis on flyback project and TimeVault. There is a — for some people maybe a little lengthy — video on blip.tv that shows how to install and use it and how straight forward the GUI is.

If you’ve been working with Drupal 6 (D6) and have taken a little time viewing

• A. Dries’ talk (mp4 video file) at Drupalcon Boston this year — especially the bit about focusing on data, exports and imports, deliver in different formats, reusing data — quoting him: “so that no single party owns the data”
• B. strolling through D6 modules already in development using RDF in some way or another, especially exhibit demos

then you really come to think of the next step of the web. Taking into account the goals set for the upcoming release (especially usability, WYSIWYG and media handling) on the one hand and through heaps of modules Drupals already extreamly flexible and extensable I really can believe it will be a “killer” as mentioned by Dries. And thereby premiering to take semantic web ceriously on a large scale.

So I propose on a more abstract level that web 3.0 (or whatever the buzzword might become) will depend on departing from the perspective “data in tables” and move towards “data in graphs”.

The really critical about this, though, could fast become that people will even more difficultly keep track of the truth or the sources of information in that matter. Only think about our media world as it is already where journalists/bloggers (name them as you wish) in large parts more or less do the copy-paste rather than actually investigating. One just hast to become even more aware I guess, which is not all that bad!

On a side note: I’m only disappointed that there was no mentioning of a couple of small but really effectiv and effectfull modules: Teleport, WYMeditor, Live or LiveSearch. But I guess they are just to specific; even though WYMeditor working properly and broadly would really give Drupal an extra push-up wow-effect that is not only shiny blink-blink.

Update: I just finished watching the video (l wrote this articel about half way through) and what do I see? Berners-Lee beeing cited saying: “From the Wourld Wide Web (WWW) to the Giant Global Graph (GGG)”. And what did I say?

Well, here you can do so right now (you need Opera or another browser with SVG-viewer; FF3 doesn’t do it — it’s a Scalable Vector Graphic)

… Damit, why doesn’t wordpress allow .svg? Well, then you will have to follow this link above (I was going to show it in this post).

Sit back, watch the video

and read more and more or more.

I’m not quite sure, yet, what I think of it, but putting the “Can it really be realised/implemented?” question aside, his idea really sounds stamin! I’ll definitely will have an eye on it and would love to see those ideas aroused!

By the way, the Drupal module it obviously started with is Activity Stream.

Side note: What do I tag this with? Where is wordpress’s option for the infinity-all-possible-ever-thought-of-tag?

Here are some more or less useful mashups (-lists) I stumbled upon that seam to be nice:

• Last.fm Mashups
• list of 36 last.fm mashups with short description

last.fm’s events function together with fusecal could be very usefull for bands’ websites to give visiters an easy way to be noticed only for concerts around there home town, e.g.

In the last couple of days I have been reading and hearing about Rootkits and the panic that comes with it. Mainly on German forums and sites, although also e.g. on Joanna Rutkowska’s blog (author of the “famous” Bluepill hijacker technique). And it kept me thinking. But first let me summerize what I understand the fuzz is all about.

A Rootkit is some sort of malware. Depending on whom you ask or enlist it is a piece of software running on someone’s computer — preferably with an Internet connection — without the user or even administrator knowing. I understand the definition itself so that this program does not have to be hiding itself in the memory and/or on the hard drive from detection software but it may (regardless of the, to my knowledge and despite Joanna’s work, unanswered question if potentially it can do so at all). Rootkits like any other malware have to be transferred to the target computer in some way or another and are — the hiding once like any other — detectable in this non-executed state (via digital signature for example). Ones primed, i.e. executed, the code becomes a process in the computer’s memory and tries to hide itself with various methods in memory and hard drives (potentially also MBR or even BIOS, but as far as I read/heard non have been reported so far).

Another factor of Rootkits is that they most often start with a small subset of code/features/routines and, ones residing in memory, recruit more and more features via the computer’s net link through a so-called back door. The back door part is why the differentiation from Trojan Horses is blurry. I’d say the Trojan Horse technique is only one of many features of such a Rootkit but that doesn’t make it a Trojan Horse since it’s not all it can do.

One other of the many possible features, and first shown by the before named Bluepill, is to become a hypervisor (think of it as a sandbox for OSs) like Xen (virtual machines like VMware, Qemu/VirtualBox work differently). The fancy bit about bluepill’s method is that, while active, the OS’ kernel is virtualized, i.e. becomes a guest OS from being host OS before; Microsoft Vista kernel here. It’s done by forcing to swap kernel parts to pagefile.sys which than are modified on disc — no Vista kernel protection — and loaded back to memory. Let me point out: On-the-fly, no reboot or BIOS or MBR modification necessary! That means that the malware runs below the OS or, rephrased the other way around, the real OS runs on top of the malware.

From Darkreading:

The new Blue Pill comes with support for so-called “nested” hypervisors (think Blue Pill within a Blue Pill), and uses an architecture similar to that of the open-source Xen 3 virtual machine technology. It comes with “on the fly” loading and unloading features, as well as more features for avoiding detection, such as hibernating and temporarily uninstalling the hypervisor when Blue Pill detects that a tool is about to detect it.

Let me add: This utilizes Pacifica specification of AMD’s newer processors which have virtualisation technology (VT) build-in. It just has been started on AMD processors but there are also implementations for Intel processors with similar techniques.

Having said all that I came to think of how could it still be possible to detect and what are the remarkable bits here. Let me also point out that I am by no means an expert on anti virus, Rootkits, hypervisors or any of that. I just know a some basic, though advanced, computer issues, how they basically work, about TCP/IP stuff and Linux OS basics. And I claim to have common sense

Ideas mentioned elsewhere to encounter the issue and comments on them:

Ok, now there is one point that is not technical at all: How do I detect something that can hide (let’s presume so) from a running system if I don’t see it and wouldn’t get alerted by any detection software? Imagine working on your computer and thinking: “Am I infected? Let’s check and boot to this detection LiveCD [see below]… checking… Good, not infected, so reboot to work system… keep on working… Oh, an now? Infected now?… LiveCD check… reboot to work, since still not infected… work a little… Hah, now is the time, I could now be infected… reboot….”.

The rumours are that it would be easy to detect the malware hiding on active systems when the system is dormant, i.e. not booted, e.g from some LiveCD. That’s one point I could believe to be true to some extant since I guess the malware has to have saved itself on system shut down to some place on the hard drive, BIOS (graphic card’s one, too), or some kind of non-volatile memory and, more importantly, cannot defend, i.e. hide, itself actively. But as with any malware detection by signature the signature of such “saved state hiding malware” has to be known which might be hard since it’s easy for malware to change it’s “saved state form” and thereby it’s signature. And also, is it handy and operably in real life to shut down, eg., servers “only” to detect potentially infected systems (again, assuming all the while it’s not possible to detect while the system is active)?

If it’s possible to only have one hypervisor (what I don’t know right now) then wouldn’t it be easy to just check if a hypervisor is present or can be enabled. If not because one is present already but not known about by the system -> suspicious. Matasano’s virtualized rootkit detector most likely is about even more than that (from Hacker Smackdown, June 28th, 2007):

Ptacek, Lawson, and Ferrie contend that virtualization-based malware is actually easier to detect than a normal (non-virtualized) rootkit because basically by definition it leaves a trail, introducing changes in the system’s CPU clock, for instance. And the malware would have to be bug-free to truly emulate a system, anyway, Ptacek argues. “The problem with virtualized rootkits is… They have to present the illusion they are talking to real hardware and that’s not an easy task,” he says. “In order to do that, you have to write a bug-free program whose job it is to emulate bugs. And we don’t know how to write bug-free programs.”

One very simply (that’s why I liked it!) detection method described in a German forum was to simultaneously do an outside port scan and ask the system “from inside” for open ports. Most likely the malware will show an open port to the outside (it wants to receive data here) but will hide this port to the system running the malware.

Ideas I haven’t read about so far or are not related directly but rather with malware in general but still fairly new:

• As a basic approach (operating) systems have to be transparent (best I know of open source) for experts to know what’s going on inside and users to trust “their” system. This is no new argument I assume.
• Digital signature (public/private keys) handling in kernel for processes similar to what I believe Vista does but holistically and, again, transparent. The idea is similar to that Debian (and other distributions since) have been using with their repositories and dpkg/apt system for years now but now within the computer itself. SecureApt as it’s called uses MD5 checksums (switch to SHA-1 when MD5 is broken) to uniquely and securely identify software packages retrieved from Internet repositories and to verify data (read byte stream) is unchanged on the way from the maintainer to the user’s computer. On top of that SecureApt uses OpenPGP (with GPG) private keys to sign repositories release summaries and public keys to verify the signature, i.e. deciding whether a repo is trusted or not. Why not taking this one step further to the kernel itself and have a module in the kernel implementing the idea of SecureApt but for processes (instances of programs from those repositories)? Though, I guess with quantum computers approaching this prevention method most likely will not hold long anyway.
• Security systems (German) like AppArmor or even better SELinux should be used more widely to protect more systems better from so-called 0-day attacks and the like. And thereby limit distribution of malware. These two methods, of course, do nothing to increase detection on harmed systems. It only prevents from becoming infected.
• Don’t by VT supported processors if you don’t need to. This, as with all security issues, will not work on a wide range since it’s more convenient to benefit from supposingly up to 95% performance enhancement for so-called paravirtualized guest systems (more precisely domUs). At least if you need to run unmodified OSs like MS Windows. If you can however modify the domUs, eg. Linux, you can have the same performance with eg. Xen. Let me point out that unlike virtualized guest operating system with paravirtualization the domU does know about it being virtualized and can, among others, access hardware directly.
• Another idea on how to become suspicious of possible infections includes a second system with net link to computers at risk. I’d call it a watch server or pass-through server. Maybe it could just be your firewall of choice. The idea is to watch the traffic from an to computers in your network just like a firewall does but watch for and learn some sort of network traffic signatures or patterns. This way you get a (statistical) profile of typical traffic regarding individual systems independent of applications running, user behaviour or or the like. Just plain network traffic. This, of course, has to be done while one is certain of no infections in the network. If one can guaranty this it could be possible after this learning phase to detect suspicious traffic.

Maybe everything said here is not new at all to others. But one thing I reckon will be true: After all it will always be a game of cat-and-mouse, since the bad guys will try to detect methods like those mentioned here to hide themselves and the good guys will always try to be smarter. The most interesting part I find about self hiding malwares is that malware is turning the tables now (well, not entirely): With conservative viruses it was evolving new techniques unknown to the anti-virus guys. Now it’s (partly) malware becoming virus-detection-detectors.

And one other thing once again became clear to me: The need for researchers to “do bad things”, i.e. to develop, test, execute, issue and whatever else necessary malware of whatever kind to be able to come up with antidote! Unfortunately there are movements on the way in Germany (German, heise, 06.07.2007 14:23) and as I understand in other parts of the would, too, to prohibit this.

Happy hacking

Update 2007/10/11:

In slashdot there has been a note on VM-Based Rootkits Proved Easily Detectable pointing out an article from researchers from Stanford, CMU, VMware, and XenSource “Compatibility Is Not Transparency: VMM Detection Myths and Realities” (pdf). Unfortunatelly, untill now I haven’t had the time to read it.

Resources:

• Computer Club Zwei web audio (30.07.2007 Episode 60)
• Computer Club Zwei forum thread (German, 26.09.2007 22:57)
• Hasch mich, ich bin ein Rootkit (German, on Heise News, 2007-07-04 11:28)
• The Invisible Things (blog of Joanna Rutkowska’s company)
• Subverting Vista Kernel For Fun And Profit (About Joanna’s talk at Black Hat Briefings on August 3rd 2006, original talk ppt)
• The Blue Pill Hype (Joanna’s Blog again)
• Blue Pill Gets a Refill (2007-08-02)
• SecureApt at Debian’s wiki (2007-09-08 17:57:23)
• Xen on Ubuntu’s community wiki (2007-09-30 03:25:10)
• Rootkit Storm and Solutions with a list of Anti-Rootkit/removal tools (2007-01-21)
• Review: Six Rootkit Detectors Protect Your System, a fairly detailed rewiev (2007-01-16 09:51)
• Peacomm.C – cracking the nutshell, an analysis of Peacomm.C mechanisms by Frank Boldewin (2007-09-21)

Over the years I often have thought how great a situation it would be if you’d come home from a conference/trip with your laptop, tuck it into the charger. Within seconds you’d be able to work on the more comfy desktop environment — meaning larger screen, nicer HIDs — and work on your automatically synchronized data without any intervention. And, also, your wife (or any “co-user” of parts of your data) could read the photos you saved on your laptop right away…

Until now I’ve never actually came across a setup that would work anything near this scenario, without an installation process that would take weeks that it. I came across thinks like coda, subversion, rsync, unionfs and heaps more. Recently I came by an article on slashdot where someone posted something very similar. Further down the suggestions by others there was a hint pointing to a new approach called dropbox. They say

imagine the best aspects of rsync, trac, subversion, but easy to use

A screencast is available, too.

Lately I’ve been thinking about the possibilities of songbird (see screencast below), collecting music distributed under common licence or the like from blogs. Wouldn’t it be great to precisely search for music that way? You could say something like “search for music that sounds like what I’m listening to right now”. That means, the method I might be working on should be efficient enough to calculate relevant vectors for different pieces of music fast. Otherwise there would have to be some central service doing some fingerprinting again for all tracks around. But, as said before, that’s not what I’m after. Rather something to get a mutual measure between two tracks, pairwise.

As you can see in the screencast songbird can already, by using diverse search services, find related music. But, as far as I can judge right now, that’s user- or expert-based. That means, the music has to be known well to a certain point to have the data what a newly found song is like. And also it’s text based.

Recently I was listening to a podcast by the German radio station Bayern 5. One topic, amongst others, was google alternatives. I’d just like to list them here with a short personal description and example searches each (searching for Edgar Allan Poe).

1. hakia.com — a semantic search engine, where one can ask complete questions or frases and hakia highlights what it thinks is the answer given per search result. You get an table of content and summary kind of view when you, for example, search for a person.
2. seakport.com — “Founded in December 2003 the company is headquartered in Munich but truly European” (from their company site). Seams fast and has the option of preview-loading the search results.
3. exalead.com — a Frensh one. Slower, has screen shots as previews (doesn’t actually load the sites) and seams to use ajax, let’s you narrow your search or give more general info about your search, features a categories|keywords kind of clowd. I cannot say anything about the search quality, but UI quality is very promissing.
4. pagebull.com — shows resulting pages as images with search term highlighted
5. searchcristal.com — actually a meta search engine, showing it’s result as a 2D cluster with distances. Interesting, but to slow for daily use (I couldn’t figure out how to get a example search link).
6. cartoo.com — Unfortunately it wouldn’t load in my opera browser via cartoo.com, and only quite slow at first in FF. With searchportal.information.com it does load in opera, too. The strategy seams to be narrowing the search showing the top results.
7. chacha.com — shows “related searches” to narrow and as a plus give the opportunity to call upon a human guide to help narrow the search. It integrates blinkx.com’s video wall.
8. suchfibel.de — List and heaps of info on search engines (German only).

Even though I’m into last.fm, if any (of those), I do understand if some Panora maniac cheets on them the alternative has to be worth a glimpse. So, it was Musicovery.com that also impressed me … at first. And I’ll admit it was mostly because of the blinky-blinky. But it’s more to it than just effects attention. From a HMI conceptional point of view Musicovery have really made an effort. It is easy to start listening to what you want — without any or, if you really want to, very little reading. In one word: I’d call it intuitive.

You are presented those, and only those, selections you need to do and combine (what you can) to make your choice distinct enough to gather correct songs. Also the other direction of “communication”, machine to human, has some promissing approaches like the “neighbourhood map” and colours for genres. One can even drag (move) that map around. The playlist is shown as path through the graph of audio tracks.

But then, of course, the hacker in me came to surface and I had to test that stuff. After a few clicks I was presented with Shakira’s “Objection” after hitting “dark” mood. Sure, no accounting for taste, but I wouldn’t call “Objection” a dark mood song. And also there was Black Eyed Peas’ “Shut up” to come… I don’t know about you; I couldn’t keep my feed still while listening and there where absolutely no “I hate the world” and “Where is my gun to get a rampage going” (just being sarcastic here). While the “energetic” direction has worked fine for a while dark more and more seams to be a bad label.

To conclude Musicovery.com nevertheless sounds very promising. I’d really like to know the “music selection techniques” behind it, though, since the more I listen to the tracks that are picked for a selected mood don’t satisfy me just like the other lot.

Edit: I just caught myself letting imaginary drift away: Wouldn’t it be possible to have, in a few years time, some HMI stuff so one brachiates though a play list just like the one displayed at Musicovery but as some sort of hologram or only imaginary (not directly visible) but more like that Wii stuff? So if one wants to ffw to a track on the playlist (displayed in some sort of 3D neighbourhood map/grid as a ball, e.g.) you grab it and drag it to the middle of the cube or punch it to play it, pet it to let information been displayed about it, …

Ever looked for a new apartment with special features such as lake side online and fat up with doing e.g. google maps look-ups for each inserat over and over? Or showing artist pictures while “mouse overing” at last.fm? This is supposed to be possible with pipes (I haven’t had the urge trying it out myself, yet).

See how O’Reilly describes the new service:

The Internet is transforming itself from a collection of web pages into a huge distributed database. There’s a wealth of data out there-not just RSS and Atom feeds, but XML data on where to find a new apartment, how much to pay for a new car, how to see if there’s a storm approaching. If the Internet is your new database, you need a tool to mine that data-to merge and sort and search and filter that data. That tool is Yahoo! Pipes. Widely touted as an RSS feed aggregator, Yahoo! Pipes is more than that. With Yahoo! Pipes you can manipulate virtually any web-accessible XML data source, and then publish these data mashups for anyone to use-anywhere.

How I found out? Well, I meshed up some old school media (good old FM Radio) with RSS, piped it through my web browser and on via an essential audio player and combined supper with news consumption in time space.

The ideal scene I have in mind is using a tablet PC in full screen mode, eg. displaying a PDF presentation or a web page design, and some meeting attendant draws his/her ideas/changes/notes on the display, marking areas, writing notes right in place, etc. A piece of software that is (graphically) on top of the display actual in sight to the observer, i.e. has the focus, collects all those “screen touches” and assigns them to the open file. But this should also work with just a normal PC/mouse set up or any tough screen environment. The hard bit would be, so I reckon, for the software to assign some “notes capture” to a certain page of an open document been presented, a subset of the document that is. The two ad hoc solutions that come to mind include either a support for the overlay software by the presenting software, so the assignment is actually done by the presenter. Or else the overlay software hast to have an understanding of all possible file formats’ structures, i.e. PDF, bitmaps, just anything that should be marked. Now, if this file is opened the next time, and the overlay software is activated, it should from it’s database display all notes associated with this document’s page.

Easy stuff I thought, someone must have done that already. But I must be missing something. Eather I haven’t searched hard enough or it is really much harder to achieve than I think. The only mentioning I have come across so far was what reads to me as it’s the same idea by moomintrol. All hints on software in comments to his post are, as he claims, missing the point in some way or another. Up to now I haven’t reviewed it myself, though.

Reviews:

• VirtualTransparency by Evan Golub: The effekt comes close — the intention obviously is more or less the same afterall — but works on a screen shot of the desktop, so really is seams not to be much more than MS Paint’s possibilities.
• TweakWindow from it’s description seams to have the essential windowing features but doesn’t ship the annotation or marking functionality. This, of course, for simple scenarios could be helped out with, say, MS Paint or any other simple drawing program. I’d have to give it a try sometime.
• The progs on the list at softwareconnection.com seamingly all work on screen shots, judged by a quick glimpse. Right now I can’t be bothered to dig into them all.
• Delight Software GmbH has a private free software that sounds rather rudimentary and lacks a detailed description (see also at download.com). Might have to try it out, also.

Additional  features could be:

• Gesture support for navigation of 1) the overlay software, eg. change of colour, and 2) the underlying program, eg. next slide commands.
• Network capability in terms of conferencing scenarios. This would make possible to have a local meeting/presentation of something on your local screen or present the same thing to another screen. This screen could even participate in annotating so you rather have two (or more) equipollent participants than a server/client structure.

… a day dream that was. I was walking through my flat listening to music of my favourite kind. Well, tell me something new you might think. Here it comes: Each time I walked from one room to another the music speakers in the next room would be activated by the N95 (or any other Upnp aware device) playing the music. So the music would only be played in that sorounding I was in. Of course the music was not locally stored on the N95 but came via Upnp (or whatever) from my file storage via ether.

That’s not so unrealistic as I thought at first. I vaguely remember reading about a sound system that can address all present speakers individually via remote control even. That, of course must have been centrally controlled, though, and should have been proprietary, i.e. only working of all hardware comes from the same manufacturer. But how about if that worked via Upnp (or anything the like)? I guess the tricky bit would be the hand over of the signals transporting the sound information, i.e. manage gapless playback as if everything was wired and feed by broadcasting the sound to the speakers. Of course the speakers most likely would have to support some kind of wireless technique that the signal could be transmitted by.

Also, some mode that does address each speaker individually should be implemented, regulating the sound volume for each box (or at least each room) so the toilette is not blasted away… But I guess that would be rather easy and does not even need a modulated infrastructure as needed for the “sound hand over” scenario described above. What a cockaigne world it would be to have an abstract layer every manufacturer sticks to and supports to handle “cross-platform-interaction” like needed here. Well, I’m looking forward to building that cockaigne and living in it. How about you?

What would be even greater to have a stationary player, say in the living room, controlled via, eg. Upnp, but still be able to have the hand over working, i.e. have the system notice where the sound should be played in which volume. Another attempt could be some kind of tracker that knows where the person listening to the music is sojourning. I don’t think that would be the best approach since most likely it needs complex structures. Plus I can’t think of a way to keep that tracker “inter-platformly” scalable for many scenarios and systems.

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Tags: upnp

To step onwards in finding a subject for my diploma thesis I’ve googled a littel and found the following:

First of all I looked for what topics are being worked on at my uni to maybe narrow it that way. Our Institute for Digital Media seamed the best guess showing a seminar by Dr. Dieter Trüstedt called “Elektronische Musik in Theorie und Praxis” (electronic music in theorie and in practice”). Only after a while I noticed that it emphasis on, or I should say is making music, not analysing it. Nevertheless I was pointed to a book by Miller Puckette (Dept. of Music, University of California, San Diego) called “The Theory and Technique of Electronic Music” including some parts about wave analysis in generell, digital music, etc.

Issues I’m looking for are as described before, more precisely finding similar music as a starting point. I also found a few (not yet reviewe) papers:

• Music Database Retrieval Based on Spectral Similarity by Cheng Yang
• Pattern Discovery Techniques for Music Audio by Roger B. Dannenberg and Ning Hu
• Toward Automatic Music Audio Summary Generation from Signal Analysis by Geoffroy Peeters, Amaury La Burthe and Xavier Rodet
• Audio Retrieval by Rhythmic Similarity by Jonathan Foote, Matthew Cooper and Unjung Nam

Also, what came to my mind what to maybe take into account how humans (mammals) distinguish music (or complex sounds) and thus learn more about the brain, also.

Another thought that hit my mind concerning the use of such an analysis was to use it in, say meeting recording scenarios as some kind of search algorithm. Imagine you have some 3 hours of meeting recorded (possibly conference call) and need some certain part of but cannot find the time position by any means. Maybe by the analysis spread out above one can use a search just as we do nowadays with text: Speak the word or phrase one is looking for (with a different voice — your own) and find the position in the audio file.

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There are some thoughts I’d like to a. document but b. share, too. They are about — no, not about Techno music! — programming issues, or just ideas I would find useful if they where already realized. Maybe they are and only I don’t know about it jet. But also, I might be the one realizing them… let’s see.

Well, one thing that came to my mind by playing around with the MusicIP Mixer: Wasn’t it cool to have a free library like thing laying around that could easily be user by a software music player (or even extended to video, i.e. media player) to generate playlists similar to the MusicIP Mixer? To be more precise the features I’m thinking about are:

• generate playlists by user selected music title from library, that is giving back a list of songs from the user’s music library that have similar mood, tempo, harmony, …
• start playing tracks from the lib. The user can skip or pin it. Either one “pin” (as in MusicIP Mixer) is enough to start generating the list or maybe even keep on with more appropriate music (closer in the above terms). That’s especially useful for those audiophiles that just cannot remember artists or track names (like me). But also it’s faster in terms of I don’t have to sit down first and think about what I’d like to here right now but rather can just find out what I’d wanted to listen to in the first place.

To brake it down, the key note here is to have two methods generating playlists that are end-user orientated. You may ask: “Well, what the hack is so special about it? You mentioned MusicIP Mixer yourself, that does exactly that!” No, it does not. MusicIP Mixer, as fare as I know, is closed source. But more importantly the list generates are encapsulated within the Mixer software and cannot (again, as far as I know) be used by other software that MusicIP Mixer itself (I’ll digg in to find out when time permits). The generators that is; one can have the generated lists send to one’s music player of choice, easily. Which is fair dinkum.

An example: As of now I chose foobar2k to be my favorite music player as it is very customizable and produces good enough sound for my HiFi (gapless playback, replaygain, multiple format support, “tabbed playlisting“, has plugin API to name a few features and components). I runs more or less 24/7. Through the foo_playlist_tree I wrote a query which gives me 10h of random music, not yet listened to or not for more than two weeks. Of course there are also queries by audio format, … just by any combination of normal audio file tags plus more. But still if I might just want say 40 min of jogging music… mmh, that I could manage by all means, plus also the hassle of time consuming transfer to your portable player if your on the run… Not a good example. OK, imagine sitting on the couch with your fb2k (keyboard remote control configured, of course) ready to blast your ears away but you just can think of what so listen to. Even with my iPAQ running Minibar2k this would not really what ease my relaxed mood. Getting it? Comments, as always, appreciated!

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Tags: audio, programming, ideas