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Booting an x86 Virtual Machine from an iPod
randomjohndoe writes "IBM has taken the next logical extension of booting Linux from a flash drive. Researchers were recently able to boot Knoppix from an iPod and run an x86 virtual machine in VMware, which provided an easy way to encrypt the whole operating environment. The tests were conducted on a 60GB iPod photo using Knoppix."
Yeah, neat.
But does it run Linu...
Oh. Nevermind.
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the iPod hard drive based?
next week, stay tuned for when they are going to install windows on a 1 gb usb keydrive!!
Now that they have Knoppix running on their iPods and are running x86 virtual machines, they could run all sorts of neat software like mpg321!
It's not designed to have the HD running very hard, either. Run an OS off your iPod for ten minutes and that bad boy is smokin' hot.
there's more than one way to do me.
Booting an operating system off of an external hard disk drive! (iPod!)
What next!? Dual monitors?!
You know, the installation of Mac OS X on my iPods and external, bus-powered FireWire LaCie drives are all bootable on any Macintosh with built-in FireWire (minus the B&W G3's and PCI G4's).
You can even store your iTunes folder on the iPod, and use iTunes to load the thing...
So basically, IBM is just saying that they've discovered that hard drives are a lot smaller and cheaper than they used to be. Wow. I'm impressed!
I'm not understanding how this encrypts "the whole operating environment". Could someone explain?
But... does it play mp3's?
Get it? Usually you ask if it runs linux, but since this Ipod does run linux, it's funnier to ask if it still can play music.
Never mind, I should just go to bed.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
Or even better, use a firewire flash drive (up to 4GB) like this one: http://www.kanguru.com/SearchResult.aspx?CategoryI D=39.
Why do you need 60GB to boot Knoppix, unless you are doing disaster recovery. Also, the constant spin of an iPod's platters will significantly decrease the life of the drive. The iPod is meant to move chunks of data (music files) over to flash memory to reduce HD spin and increase battery life. Not to run an OS.
Target/Firewire boots have been a life-saver in the Mac world and I often wonder why PC manufacturers don't incorperate this functionality.
Did the submitter even read the article? It's primarily about IBM's SoulPad software, not the fact that they booted linux from an iPod.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Sweet! :)
Why is this called "research"? How is this scholarly in any way?
Shouldn't this just be called "trying out neat new things to do with Linux" ?
Gosh!
Now all that aside, what's so cool about it? If I had a team of people smart enough to do something like this, I'd rather have that intellectual capacity directed at something more 'useful'. I'm not a CS person so I lack examples, but I'm sure people can come up with some.
All they're doing is using the ipod as a bootable USB hard drive. It's no different to booting your computer with a USB hard drive, or any kind of flash memory.
In fact, a few years ago, I booted my computer from a Nokia 5510 phone which has 64Mb of RAM. I had a minimal Linux (LinuxFromScratch) installation on it - minimal lilo installation to handle the boot, a loopback filesystem to contain an Ext2 fs with Linux on it and a small initrd which contains the usb-storage driver and handles mounting the loopback etc.
It was slow, but worked quite nicely.
I eventually started playing with a USB 2.0 Hard Drive and that works incredibly well with any PC that boots from a USB Drive (or failing that, I even made a boot floppy for those that don't).
But who's going to be the first to run the x86 OSX hack on it?
iPOD this and iPOD that, this is slashdot, stop jacking off with your small iDICK and report some decent iNEWS that is iSLASHDOT 2.0 ready.
Won't you have product activation problems (I'm assuming WinXP here) if you try to take that keydrive and plug it into a different machine?
Good thing we know better than to use crapware like Windows, then!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Sharp has done this already with their latest Zaurus line. With a built-in 4Gb hard disk, powered by Linux, rotatable screen and keyboard, it is like a miniature laptop.
The thing I want to know is, what CPU architecture are they playing with? Last time I checked, glibc was dropping support for ARM (which the Zaurus uses). What will IBM be using? (their own chips?)
They're obviously not using x86 (too power hungry I think).
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
Good thing anyone thinking of this has got themselves a copy of the corp. edition of XP Pro with a generated key.
They just have to worry about having the i386 dir on the key so it can auto install the hardware every time they move.
You sir, have just described a Mac. If the intel switch works, I'm dual booting OS X and Slackware and I'm not looking back.
That's kinda a stretch. IBM is a corporation, not a government agency. If the government pays them, I'm sure it's to buy stuff or pay for specific tasks, not "here's some money. kk thx."
If you buy IBM products, it's no longer your money, it's theirs. Likewise, if I buy a used iPod from you, would you want me telling you how to spend that money?
Plus, what they're doing is proof of concept type stuff. Research. Not enough companies to this kind of stuff anymore. Xeorx, AT&T, DEC.. all gone. IBM does research on a lot more then this too - they're into a lot of shit. I say we encourage them to keep it up. Because it's not like Microsoft does any cool stuff like this.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
So, we're going to start buying 60gb Ipod Photos just to run an OS on them? Seriously, what's the point? An IPod hard drive was configured to access photos and songs at optimum speed, or just songs if it's not a photo model, not to deal with the massive overhead of running an OS. Can you imagine the pain of the third-degree burns if you picked up an IPod running an OS? Especially Windows...
IBM has done some really nice things for the os community. Maybe this will turn out well. <hope fingers="crossed"/>
I mean *useful* stuff on knoppix, like LVM support.
Now that would be *radical*!
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
I'm still waiting to install Linux on my microwave so it cooks the popcorn automatically without setting it on fire and triggering the fire alarm.
It is not very healthy for the iPod to run an OS for very long on an iPod though.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
And by x86 VMware, you mean booting OSx86, right :). That would be quite and ironic twist for Apple.
This reminds me of a product called the MCC Modular PC from MMC Computer Company. It got reviewed by Maximum PC Recently,
although I couldn't say that it was to a standing ovation.
The whole idea is that you CAN use portable media to create a stable live operating system that you can take with you. But it's been done before, which means that this is only a jibe at Apple, although the ubiquity of iPods would help to make portable OSs more popular
Due to financial difficulties, the light at the end of the tunnel has been turned off.
For all you who didn't RTFA, they are booting from a USB mass storage device (which just happens to be an iPod) running Knoppix, and virtualizing the hardware to allow a less flexible OS (*cough* windows *cough*) to run on virtually any x86 hardware. The benefit being that you can take your Windows desktop's "Soul" with you on your iPod and just plug it in and go wherever you have a computer handy. Nothing revolutionary here except that IBM is starting to push this tword a dedicated device and software that should make setting this sort of thing up easier for the layperson. Pretty soon grandma will be toting her windows install, complete with Word, Explorer, and her favorite games downloaded from Yahoo, all on her trendy iPod which she can also use to listen to cool tunes when she's on the plane and doesn't have her grandson's computer to borrow.
Personally I think this trend could be a very good thing, what with the horrible attempts at separation of user data in current operating systems where the majority of the data is actually shared.
The computer industry seems to be moving at different speeds. Today, for example, you can buy a 64-bit CPU that operates at 3gHz, 32-bit memory that operates at 400mHz, and a 128-bit graphics card with 300mHz RAMDAC. Nobody seems interested in designing a complete system in the PC industry -- instead all the "progress" is in optimizing or extending components and hoping they work when you throw them together.
While generally I'd agree with that statement, it's not quite as clear cut as you make out. most programs run in small loops, so while your entire system may have 1gb of physical ram, it also has a few mb in cache spread through the various chips (like the CPU, graphics chip etc) eg a P4 with HT has atleast 512k cache. Most of the time the CPU is only using that cache and not using the system memory.
In short while it's a good idea to get everything working together and talking faster, in most cases bigger cache's and improving adding / seperating the busses will produce the desired effect without the additional costs & other problems involved with getting everything communicating at the same speed as the CPU.
So wait. You have an HD you carry around. You go to work, stick it in some computer, pull it out, go home stick it in another computer. So, they are doing what a USB memory stick has done for ages, but instead they are going to sell this as a (secure?) replacement for a laptop? Couldn't I just carry a laptop around, with a segmented HD and do the same shit at half the cost, and be able to work on whatever when I am not at either location. Uhh, sweet. Oh, encryption, right. Not that my entire HD isn't secure enough.
Is there anything better than clicking through Microsoft ads on Slashdot?
take one part linux and one part ipod, instant /. lovefest. i would make the analogy of combining food with sex, but that would be met with blank stares here.
that the ipod now supports OGG?
Wasn't that what John Shaft called his apartment?
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Booting an x86 Virtual Machine ON an iPod, especialy after reading x86 emulator on psp
that would have been infinantly sweeter.
Chances are any disscution on Slashdot will degrade into a flamewar about ID/Christianity within 14 posts.
Oh wow, an iPod, must be newsworthy!
Damn Small Linux
Now entering infinite loop of cynical irony.
uhm... no...
even current ppc macs are similar in hardware design to pcs... with the same busses and whatnot.
By your statement any old dell is a "complete system" like that.
I think what the OP was yearning for was the days when the whole computer was built via proprietary systems. (like an Amiga for instance)
I loved my Amiga, but upgrades were a bitch (A500), and the systems that were upgradable had components like PCS... although with a different architecture (Zorro 3 anyone?)
IMHO, computers are like stereos... best to pick and choose your own components.
If I can't smoke and swear I'm fucked.
What is ironic is they are using Linux to boot Windows (or any x86 OS) You can use ANY adequetly configured pc to boot from. They chose Knoppix for it's excellent hardware detection. The data is encrypted and within 2 minutes you can have your entire desktop restored from a suspended state. If you actually go to the project web site http://www.research.ibm.com/WearableComputing/Soul Pad/soulpad.html there is some really cool potential to this. Booting from a USB device is a no brainer but the stuff they are doing will make taking it with you much easier and cost effective.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
and while this sounds like an interesting hack I wish more focus would be placed on making the entire platform secure.
I'd say this system actually did this part. I mean, after all, the SoulPad software features an encrypting userspace kernel module to encrypt the file system, thus making it a secure solution. Anything short of TPA really couldn't do a better job. And we know how slashdotters feel about that.
As for the rest of your comment, bullshit. Has nothing to do with anything. Encryption in software will always and forever be better than encryption in hardware because as that hardware ages, bugs will be found, and holes will be punched. If it's a software file system, you're inconvienenced by a few hours of decrypting all your files and re-encrypting at the most, or just patching your system in the least. Meanwhile with your solution, you'd throw away the whole computer.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
HOW IT WORKS
BlackDog is a fully self-contained computer with a built-in biometric reader and a host of other powerful features. Unlike any other computing device, BlackDog is completely powered off of the USB port of your host computer - no external power adapter required!
To access and use your BlackDog, you merely plug it in to your host computer's USB port* and BlackDog takes over! Your host machine's monitor, keyboard, mouse, and Internet connection are taken over by BlackDog for the duration of your session, when you are done, you simply remove BlackDog and everything on the host is returned to its original state.
BlackDog datasheet
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Posted anonymously to avoid ob-karma-whoring.
The virtual computer user environment setup is called SoulPad, and consumers install it from a x86-based home or office PC. SoulPad uses a USB (universal serial bus) or FireWire connection to access the network cards for connecting to the Internet, the computer's display, the keyboard, the main processor and the memory, but not the hard disk.
After the person disconnects the system, SoulPad saves all work to the device, including browser cookies or other digital signatures that a PC keeps in its short-term memory.
The name SoulPad comes from the concept of separating a PC into a body (processor, memory, keyboard, display) and a soul (data, applications, personal settings).
Right now, the product is in the testing phase, but SoulPad contributor Ramon Caceres, a staff member at the Wearable Computing division of IBM Research, said the technology could be licensed to hardware manufacturers that could make them into dedicated devices.
"We had been looking at how people can carry their computing environments around without carrying a laptop," Caceres said. "The SoulPad is particularly good for business travelers that carry work between home and office by carrying a small device instead of a full PC. It's also great because it puts very minimal demands on the PC that you are using at the time."
The idea of booting from portable hard drives is not new, nor is the trend of letting consumers carry their entire desktop, including programs and personal preferences, with them as they travel between home and office.
U3, a consortium of USB flash drive manufacturers, is a month away from launching its official campaign to educate consumers on the benefits of using flash-based drives beyond basic data storage.
"There is no question that what we are doing and what IBM is doing will converge someday," Kate Purmal, CEO of U3, said.
IBM said three technology trends have recently made SoulPad feasible: larger, faster and cheaper portable storage devices; auto-configuring operating systems that can boot on unknown hardware without a separate installation phase; and the emergence of virtual machine technology on PC-class machines.
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The SoulPad software uses 6GB of space--4GB for the auto-configuration operating system and 2GB for space needed to swap and store encrypted data.
Beyond that, the size of the drive depends on how much data the user wants to carry around, Caceres said. And while using a flash memory-based hard drive is feasible, IBM stuck with hard-disk drives to fully test the capacity of SoulPad.
IBM conducted its tests on a 60GB iPod photo using Knoppix, a Linux software derivative, as an auto-configuration OS, VMware Workstation as the virtual machine monitor and an x86 PC as the encrypted virtual machine. That is where the SoulPad software partitions personal applications such as Microsoft Word or the Firefox Web browser, along with the guest operating system and personal data the user would like to carry around.
"We chose Knoppix because this flavor of Linux is good at booting on unknown PCs without asking a lot of questions," Caceres said. "In a product version, the user would be able to configure the SoulPad boot sequence so that the device knows what data and applications they want. At the moment, we do it by hand and it takes us a little longer to boot."
Shutting down the SoulPad device and walking away takes about 20 seconds. Coming back to the same PC after attaching the SoulPad to the PC takes about two minutes.
While traveling, Caceres said the user could attach the SoulPad to a lighter laptop and switch back to a more powerful laptop while not traveling. Similarly, an insurance worker could insert his or her SoulPad into a tablet PC for on-site appraisals, then into a desktop PC for other work.
For those who didn't RTFA, IBM is developing a way for you to take the portable HD you installed an OS onto from your computer and use it to boot another computer somewhere else, a function very familiar to Mac users who've been doing it pretty much since the FireWire port was invented, but is as yet not possible on WinTel/x86 machines. All I can say, It's About F***ing Time.
Go hang a salami, I'm a lasagna hog
After going over the comments, it seems that most of the people miss the point. It's easily understandable why, because the Slashdot headline is somewhat misleading.
This is not a "gee wiz, somebody got Knoppix to run on an iPod and encrypt the files on the drive". That would be kind of pointless. What makes this newsworthy is that they have developed a way to put an OS, applications, and datafiles all together on one portable device. This way, you can take everything in your computer (including the OS and its configuration), or as they put it the "soul" of your machine, and run it on another machine independent of whatever OS is installed on it.
While currently you can store your own data files on a flash drive and access them on another PC (so as long as that PC has the software needed to read those files), you're still limited to the OS and configuration of that temporary host. With this, the temporary host doesn't even have to have an OS installed on it; it's all run from the portable device.
The Internet is generally stupid
Linux booted on device X, which, depending on the value of X, can either be crazy weird (a watch) or pretty boring (iPod drive).
Can anyone suggest an article in the format
"Booting Linux on a _______"
that would not be vaguely believable?
xkcd.com - a webcomic of mathematics, love, and language.
How about booting to OSX86 from a 4GB iPod mini as an external bootable drive? From the little I've had time to read on it, it appears to need an entire hard drive and the only usable spare drive I have is my 2gen 4GB mini, easily backed up and restored with itunes. I've can boot to DamnSmallLinux from an old spare 128mb usb drive, I'd think OSX needs a little more space, at least a gig or two, leaving my MiniPod as the only option. No, I'm not going to spend money on another drive just to try running it maybe a dozen times.
F7 doesn't work, ignore spelling and grammar
They want their idiot back.
This is interesting, but 'a group of IBM researchers'? I wouldn't really call this research. Kind of cheapens the word when you refer to a group of guys pissing around at IBM getting shit to boot off an iPod in the same context as people trying to find disease cures or understand the creation of the universe.
I'm not saying I have anything against Apple, just the fans. The rabid ones. To tell you how much they scare me, consider having to use a '56k'(yeah, right) dialup connection for another decade or two. Exactly. I have never actually cared about having an iPod. I also don't like USB a whole lot... ANYWAY... If the price comes down a little, I may consider purchasing one. Not for music, but for general storage and sutff like this. Am I promised not to become one of the RAF? (Rabid Apple Fan)
title says it all
I've spent the past weekend attempting to run linux under windows or the other way around with vmware, and here IBM makes it work on a damn iPod!
Well congrats, bastards.
what if there were no hypothetical questions?
Sorry Mr. Jobs.
That was easy, wasn't it.
[Ed. "most suited for being"? Is that English - let's take a poll...]
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
The main interest of this article is the IBM SoulPad research project, here: http://www.research.ibm.com/WearableComputing/Soul Pad/soulpad.html.
There's a neat video of how it works too.
.: Max Romantschuk
Can it perform cunnilingus on a hardwood floor?
The latest Slashdot meme.
Try using Gentoo on the microwave to more reliably burst your kernels (ouch, yes that's experience typing :-)
> > stay tuned for when they are going to install windows on a 1 gb usb keydrive!!
> Won't you have product activation problems (I'm assuming WinXP here) if you try to take that keydrive and plug it into a different machine?
Not if you RTFA. The whole point of Soulpad is to keep a virtual PC on the portable hard-drive. So you could install XP on it, which will run in VMware under Knoppix, and move the virtual PC around to different real PCs. No re-activation needed!
to actually figure out all the random issues
There is nothing to "figure out": that stuff is pretty elementary system
administration. VMware makes it particularly trivial, but it's not hard to do the same thing with user mode Linux and Xen.
It's more of a complete solution, versus a bunch of ideas that "anyone could have put together" but no one did.
It becomes a "solution" once it's a shipping product.
Given that you can install Linux on a dead badger... I'm afraid the answer to your question is a resounding negative.
I can finally have itunes on my ipod. Bliss!
...you could do it without an iPod or Flashdrive! Imagine if you could just point a web browser at your box at home and you could use it as if you were there!
..oh... yeah. SSH, X11, VNC. Surely these are better solutions than having to takeover someones whole computer just because you can't stand to loose your session data or use WinXP? I guess its neat that someone has put a LiveCD on RAM, but it seems to make life harder than it really needs to be - still each to there own.
Scared of flying, pointy things snce 1979!
"In essence, your CPU runs as fast as your memory, and in this case you are only getting 1/7 of your CPU when you use your system. If the memory people and the CPU people get together and work out a faster interface and memory access, everything works more efficiently."
This is a completely ignorant statement. Just what did you think SDRAM, DDR SDRAM, DDR2 SDRAM, and even the hated Rambus DRAM (RDRAM) were? That's right, they were all attempts to improve memory interfaces.
What's more, most of them were well-informed by people from the CPU side of things. (In some ways RDRAM wasn't, since it tried to trade bad latency for great bandwidth, but it wasn't always clear that was a bad idea. In fact, it may merely have been ahead of its time. RDRAM's worst problems were not technical.)
For a simple example of how DRAM interfaces have been designed around CPU needs, consider plain old SDRAM. At the time of its introduction, most personal computer CPUs had a 64-bit (8-byte) wide data bus and used a cache line size of 32 bytes. The cache line is the minimum amount of memory the CPU reads or writes at a time. SDRAM was therefore designed to support 4-beat burst operations (8 bytes times 4 cycles of burst = 32 bytes, or one cache line). Furthermore, rather than always sequencing through the requested addresses in linear fashion, SDRAM also allowed the CPU to tell the RAM which word out of the 4-beat burst should come first (critical word first), a feature which reduced the average access latency.
There have also been specialized memories designed for specific applications. For instance, some memory designed for video cards supports operations like block fills so that the GPU doesn't have to explicitly write each byte to set every pixel to the same color.
The reason for memory speed bottlenecks is that we simply don't know how to make memory which performs as fast as the CPU core. Main memory is still DRAM, and DRAM is nothing more than an array of capacitors. To change a capacitor's state, you have to charge or discharge it. You can't do so any faster than physics allows (given constraints such as how much current can be sourced or sunk by the write drivers, the size of the capacitor, what voltage constitutes a '1' and a '0', and so forth). (Note that read performance is constrained to a large degree by write performance, since reading a DRAM capacitor erases it and thus every read must be followed by a writeback. In practice, successive reads to localized areas are faster due to how DRAM work internally, but random reads are very much limited by write performance.)
It so happens that with current chip processes, the speed at which you can charge and discharge DRAM capacitors is much slower than the speed at which core CPU logic can operate. Nobody likes that, but it's reality and we have to deal with it.
But that's not the only problem. Even the SRAM L1 and L2 caches are beginning to fall behind CPU core logic in performance. It used to be the case that a L1 cache hit would take 1 cycle. Now it's 2, 3, sometimes more. This is on the same chip! You can't possibly even begin to blame memory and CPU designers for not talking to each other on this one. The problem is the laws of physics; ye canna change them. And right now, given the devices we know how to make, they constrain usefully large amounts of memory to be much slower than logic gates.
So please, stop trying to armchair quarterback. You have no understanding of what really led to things being the way they are today.
I might as well ask a question. I googled up a simple one click mp3/ogg converter that would keep the bit rates that were in the mp3's and not perform any further loss (in conversion, if any, since they compress different).
I couldn't find one. The brilliance of google brought up hundreds of:
"convert-mp3-download-free-tunes-imusic-
itunes-ogg-divx-free.castadnetwork.com"
websites, but nothing of note.
Can I simply run a quick app to mass convert, but tell it to skip certain trees that contain mp3 program files (like games mp3's, although increasingly I see ogg used in games).
That'd be 1337.
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
Intrepid VMWare users have been putting virtual machines on thumb drives for some time now. The only reason they haven't put VMWare itself on the thumb drive is that VMWare scrawls all over the dang registry while it's being installed. I guess this is a way around that. I think I'll stick with my VMWare thumb drive and VMWare cd. I love VMWare - I even have the teeshirt!
Sorry, I've read the article, I've watched the video but I still fail to see what "SoulPad" is in a product sense. Sure, I can see it being a concept but... well, they use Knoppix booting from an external device, that then fires off some HDD encryption program that allows access to a VMWare VM.
/. worthy though.
This is all stuff that is available right now... where's the innovation?
I am currently "researching" something similar, although I'm trying to not need to reboot the host PC. Stuff I'm looking at is Qemu and VMWare ACE with Truecrypt handling the encryption. Hardly
boot Knoppix from an iPod...
notice the word FROM, if they were running on the iPod the sentence would read "booted knoppix on an iPod", from an iPod implies that it's just being used as a usb disk, but someone decided to mention ipod to get in the news.
This is a lame news post and none of you actually rtfa!!!
Mod parent down, OMFG he didn;t get it
Home on iPod was a feature slated for inclusion in OSX 10.3 Panther - it was the opportunity to have an encrypted home directory, containing application settings, documents and apps in a partition on an iPod's internal drive.
When connected to a supported Mac, the OS would allow the user to log in with their usual login and password, giving a seamless M
the feature was apparently scrapped as desktop usage was too stressful on the iPod hard drive
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
giving a seamless Mac user experience
I'm not sure what happened there..
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
But still I like it as it'll help consultants carry light! Knoppix or Ubuntu also offer Live CD's.
Java Oracle Linux Enthusiast
That's a very, very, very, very bad idea. Let me explain why.
.mp3 files into .ogg, you'd need to first convert all of your .mp3 files into ogg. This would require the use of the LAME encoder (To convert the mp3's to wav), and then the ogg Vorbis encoder would have to convert all those wavs into .ogg format. You will lose all your id3 tag information.
First.
Let me get some definitions straight:
mp3: Lossy format. Converting to mp3 means encoding your music. The best encoder is LAME (As proof, I suggest you check out hydrogenaudio)
ogg Vorbis: Lossy format. Converting to ogg means encoding your music. The best encoder is (offcourse) the original ogg Vorbis encoder.
mpc/Musepack: Yet an other lossy format. Converting to mpc means encoding your music. The best encoder is (offcourse) the original Musepack encoder.
flac: Lossless format. Converting to flac means compressing your music, as in: "I just compressed a text file, and did not lose any bytes in the file during compression". The best compressor for FLAC is offcourse the original FLAC Compressor.
Compressing: Making filesize smaller, without loss of data.
Encoding with lossy format: Making filesize smaller, at the cost of audio information.
Second.
To transcode your
Anyone who comes up with a simpler/faster solution (ie. "You dont need to convert to wav first!"), has very little to no insight into how digital audio encoding works, and what happens in the process of a transcoding/encoding/decoding.
Third.
If you convert from a lossy format to a lossy format, you will lose significant amounts of quality. DO NOT CONVERT FROM LOSSY TO LOSSY!
It does not matter if you convert a 320kbps mp3 into super-high-quality ogg - You still get huge amounts of loss due to the fact that the original material is lossy.
Fourth.
If you want to test out ogg Vorbis, then encode any of your legally bought hi-quality cd's to ogg, and listen to wether you like the result.
Fifth.
This should be obvious, but I'll tell you anyway: If you convert from lossy to lossless (ie wav or flac), quality will NOT increase.
Hope I could be of some informative value to you.
Now seriously, at times it seems like any crap gets the /. front page if it mentions an iPod. I remember for example the front page story (I'm too lazy to search and post the link though) about using a lot of iPods as USB hard drives to haul around movie footage.
/. editor) for whom the mere mention of an iPod makes something newsworthy. Because whoa, it's an iPod! Any example of someone using it, in no matter how trivial and normal a way, is automatically soo cool.
And just like in this case, an overpriced USB HDD at that, if used for only that purpose. For all its merits as an MP3 player, if you're going to use it _only_ as an external HDD, there are much cheaper HDD's around.
I don't know, there seems to be a segment of the population (and apparently at least one is a
I'm guessing that if I posted a blog about me backing up my downloaded WoW patches on an iPod, or saving mom's digital photos on an iPod, I could get front page on Slashdot too. Heck, probably even using it as an MP3 player could get front page, if for example I hoooked it to my speakers and used it for music for a dance party.
But, yeah, unless you fall into that population segment, there's absolutely no reason to think anything other than "big deal".
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Hey if you had an iPod shuffle, you could surprise yourself by booting up a random OS each time! :D
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I would have been more informative if I didn't now have to highlight the errors.
.mp3 files into .ogg, you'd need to first convert all of your .mp3 files into ogg. This would require the use of the LAME encoder (To convert the mp3's to wav)
:-)
BTW I specialise in human perception based lossless compression techniques, such as images based, scene based or (not yet - but well known) audio based.
postscript, erm, added up here, because I can edit anywhere after preview: If you want to see good scene based compression, check out F.E.A.R and see the multi resolution decals that nucleate around areas of interest, which is simple idea, but now it is being used more and more! (back to the original programming)
MP3 being lossy, and removing certain characteristics I hoped by uncompressing it to a wav, if visualised it would have similar to the rings and highlights of wavelet compression (not the same, but similar, in a hypothetical visualisation) I hoped ogg would not alias on these, and still produce a comparative sound.
It was just a way of forgeting to look for mp3 and ogg support in future.
I am not an audiophile. I know various lossless compression techniques, from basic RLE to huffman encoding.
It is not a very very bad idea. It might not be as good as getting all my originals and converting them, but I would prefer to dump all my MP3's to 128kps ogg or something, jsut for convenience.
If you convert from a lossy format to a lossy format, you will lose significant amounts of quality. DO NOT CONVERT FROM LOSSY TO LOSSY!
Yes, which is why I hoped about not loosing too much. I am not an audiophile, my speakers are crap and I wouldn't perceive too much of a difference, if at all.
To transcode your
Nitpick: codec mean enCOder and DECoder. The LAME encoder can only do wav to MP3 (for arguments sake) you need the LAME decoder to move from MP3 to wav!
It does not matter if you convert a 320kbps mp3 into super-high-quality ogg - You still get huge amounts of loss due to the fact that the original material is lossy.
This is the bit that narked me. This is unsubstantiated. The lossy characteristics of MP3 are known to me, the ogg characteristics are not.
People say if you resave a jpeg multiple times you degrade it. Technically wrong. The pattern is symmetric, you can decode, and re-encode without any problems as long as you do not change the data in between. (this is true for most, you could have a specific encoder that would break this rule by using some maxima and minima that would chance with each re-encoding, but it is not inherent in the technology, and I am talking abotu wavelet compression).
So if the MP3 characteristics in the wav file did not degrade the performance of ogg (by making it hard for the encoder to chew) or make the wave format more susceptible to the ogg encoders quantization algorithms, then I would say that your theory, in general is sound, and true, in the bass of the evidence, but not on a scale that warrants particular interest.
Again, if you can back it up, that is the info I was hoping for! Thanks!
I guess a simple binary diff of the resulting wav files> orig, mp3'd, mp3'd>ogg'd. This would show the unencoded signature of the data, that would allow you to calculate errors... but further algorithms would have to be taken into account to give perceivable errors, which means you must define a consumer of the data, i.e. an observer (or in this case a listener).
You could model this to something like a car stereo, and you could apply specialised compression to model the perception of someone in a car. But then, why the feck bother.
Fourth.
If you want to test out ogg Vorbis, then encode any of your legally bought hi-quality cd's to ogg, and listen to wether you like the result.
I find your insinuation that the 30gigs of MP3's on various media strewn across my desk,
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The logical extension of where this is going to end up is on the mobile phone. Not with todays technology, but with more advances in portable storage and very high speed mobile networks for remote storage. Desktops could eventually just be a generic (dumb) screen with a build in cpu, memory, keyboard & mouse; and a slot in the stand where you drop your phone into. The OS and apps would be on the phones local storage, and your personal files would be served remotely and securely over the mobile network. You wouldn't want to keep them on the phone in case you lost it, or it got stolen.
Accessing your personal desktop and data from anywhere would be a easy as dropping your phone into your friends PC, or the PC at the hotel, or work, or internet cafe, or just about anywhere.
Last i heard the iPod was a external USB HD ( with a couple of extra features )..
So why does anyone really care?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Being an audiophile with experience in mp3 encoding since 2001, having a media library of 32,4GB and 5,510 music files, I'll try to back up all my statements with sufficient evidence, or sufficiently rational train of thought.
And who says CD's are high quality
- When I said "High-Quality CD", I was referring to the average music CD, of which you have an original, which is without any scratches, to give the ogg Vorbis encoder a fair chance of providing a realistic transparent result, so you could decide wether you liked the encoder or not.
The LAME encoder can only do wav to MP3
- Wrong. The LAME encoder can also decode mp3's, as it has a built-in decoder. Your arguement stands undefeated, though - Yes, to decode an mp3, you'd need an mp3 decoder.
MP3 being lossy, and removing certain characteristics I hoped by uncompressing it to a wav, if visualised it would have similar to the rings and highlights of wavelet compression (not the same, but similar, in a hypothetical visualisation) I hoped ogg would not alias on these, and still produce a comparative sound.
- When you encode an original lossless source, into mp3, you lose some of the original information. Wether you can percieve this loss or not, is irrelevant to the fact that loss does occur.
If you decode any given mp3 file, and save it as a
If you transcode your mp3 file into ogg, the result will always be lower quality than the source. Wether you percieve this loss or not, is irrelevant. I never stated that you had perfect hearing, nor did I ever state that you (Or anyone else) could percieve this loss.
People say if you resave a jpeg multiple times you degrade it. Technically wrong. The pattern is symmetric, you can decode, and re-encode without any problems as long as you do not change the data in between.
- As you said, for the jpg not to decrease in quality, you'd have to not change data in between. This means that the jpeg would not get re-encoded after each save. With music encoding, change DOES occur, and loss DOES happen.
When you say should be obvious, are you saying is should have been obvious, but apparently wasn't?
- I've seen people argue that if you decode a 64kbps mp3 into wav, you'd get an increase in sound quality. As you believed that a conversion from mp3 to ogg would benefit you in terms of sound quality, I decided to point out this fact to you.
Yet again, I suggest that you read up on hydrogenaudio, and especially the General mp3 forum
The LAME developers are active participants on HA, and many audiophiles post lots and loads of usefull information about audio-related topics there.
looks like a nasty seam to me.
funny.,. a seamless experience and a seamy experience seem not quite to be opposites
...and now it is built in to Windows for any PC with firewire, just connect the cable and they are both on a 400Mbps TCP/IP network. In fairness you do have set up a network share on one of the computers, but arguably this is a security feature.
For those looking for a similar approach, but to take their *Linux* environment with them anywhere, and run it on a Windows platform, I highly recommend coLinux.
Since Windows always has, and always will (well, for the forseeable future) have better and more timely hardware support, having the core OS be Windows tends to have advantages. Also, I can test on IE, and Windows versions of Firefox and Opera, all on the same box.
But my core work, developing on Linux, doesn't need all of that fancy hardware support, I just need the tools. CoLinux lets me run a virtual Linux session under Windows, with networking, and access via X (or VNC).
I take my virtual 2G partition with me between work, home, and elsewhere, with the coLinux binaries there as well, in case I need a quick install on some new Windoiws box.
I would love to see a Knoppix-like ISO for coLinux; plug it into your windows box, and be running a full Linux desktop virtually.
Oh yeah, and the real kicker for me, is performance. It vastly outperforms Linux running under VMWare. And it never has crashed on me (well, except when I removed the networking driver on the Windows side, while coLinux was still running).
Definitely worth checking out.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
I actually came across this a few days ago when I was talking to a friend who wanted to be able to encrypt his entire Windows filesystem. There doesn't seem to be a freeware product which will do this for Windows, but loop-aes (which IBM mention in their SoulPad paper) does it for Linux, so I suggested he could boot Linux and have it load QEMU and run Windows from there. I notice that IBM have thought about it a bit more than I have though, they mention stuff like tweaking the Linux startup so that USB modules load first. It's a pity there aren't any more details of the procedures necessary, but I guess if they're going to make it into a product and sell it then they can't go giving away all the info about how it works. Somebody should see if they can figure out an open source alternative.
Their researchers figured out how to plug an iPod into a PC and store data on it? I was able to do that using a Windows 98 machine a year ago. They should really get their butts in gear and do something useful like figure out how to boot an x86 virtual machine on the iPod itself.
In the tradition of slashdot, I will explain my ironic statements!
:-) I am ok with 48/96 kbps most of the time! not even 128kbps!
And who says CD's are high quality
- When I said "High-Quality CD", I was referring to the average music CD
I was being sarcastic, 44khz is enough for me. Look up sony's super cd, something like 120khz? check out SACD in plain english I don't pretend that you might not have heard of this before, just bringing it up.
The LAME encoder can only do wav to MP3
- Wrong. The LAME encoder can also decode mp3's, as it has a built-in decoder.
It was semantics: codec is the word that means encode/decode. An encoder cannot decode. A codec can do both. LAME is a encoder/decoder, therefore it is a codec. The encoder component could be described as 'decoding from wav to mp3' though... but it is strange to think like that!
- When you encode an original lossless source, into mp3, you lose some of the original information. Wether you can percieve this loss or not, is irrelevant to the fact that loss does occur.
No need to add emphasis, I am quite well read on compression schemes, I know this. I mention in my message, if you have some real evidence of the cost incurred to recompress an mp3 as ogg I would be interested, but I used an educated guess to say that I wouldn't notice the difference, and that isn't a slight to my own hearing capabilities, but a general hunch about how ogg works.
The loss from the interpolation of mp3 and ogg encoding
Interpolation? I don't think anything is interpolated... maybe you meant something else?
If you transcode your mp3 file into ogg, the result will always be lower quality than the source
Since I didn't argue against that, I merely asked what would the loss be (see original post) I find the added emphasis you gave this sentence to be rather insulting, as it makes it out that I was under the impression this would not be the case.
I haven't looked at the algorithm ogg uses, I guess this means I will now have to.
This means that the jpeg would not get re-encoded after each save.
Oh no, it does, the data stream will get reencoded with no knowledge of its previous encoding.
However, if you use a different algorithm, then of course each time a different part of the file would be deemed, in a different way, redundant. Be it a DCT and quantization ala Jpeg97 or wavelet transforms like Jpeg2000. Or even Limel-Ziff-Welsch's algorithm for gif compression.
I reference image formats because I have more experience, the reasoning is the same.
Look, we are going into this and saying the same things. I didn't expect you to take objection to anything I wrote, particularly not say the same thing back.
Again, my original question was ****WHAT**** was the additional loss from mp3 to ogg, not a generic 'lossy to lossy is bad'. Just to point that out!
Anyway, forget it, I will stick with mp3's, maybe it is your audiophile side pushing this too far!
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I don't think anything is interpolated... maybe you meant something else?
:)
- My english sucks. I ment to say "The result of the two encoders diffirent encoding techniques, possibly amplifying the bad side-effects of each other"
Well, now there is nothing to argue
One final note, though.
I am ok with 48/96 kbps most of the time! not even 128kbps!
- I believe that you can convert to ogg safely without hearing any significant change in quality. Only thing I'm wondering is, why you'd want to do that.
What about booting an i386 machine from a "live" image on my Treo600 Smartphone? Either from a 1GB Flash card, or even downloading from a remote fileserver over 3G (OK, 2.5G)? Can these solutions be genericized, so any mobile device can take over any desktop one happens to have physical/reboot access to?
--
make install -not war
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
Although i haven't read the article...
i understand it IBM is using iPod as an external storage device to boot Linux from. That is nothing new.
and as far as booting a linux that actually runs on iPod - been there, done that - i have linux running in mine. http://ipodlinux.org/
The new model SL600 uses the Intel® XScale(TM)7 (PXA255, 400MHZ) CPU.
Did I steal your job ... and now your iPod?
"****WHAT**** was the additional loss from mp3 to ogg"
:/
to restate the obvious, MP3 is a lossy compressed format. Ogg Vorbis is a lossy compressed format. Your MP3 file already is a lower quality than the original wav file. You convert the MP3 back to wav, which hasn't improved anything. Then you convert the new wav to Ogg Vorbis. In the Ogg Vorbis lossy compression, you lose even more audio data than the original MP3 compression. The end result is a worse sounding file than the MP3. The lower the bitrate, the worse it will be. I can think of no reason to do this kind of conversion, other than just to be stupid.
And if your reasoning for buying into an Ogg Vorbis player had anything to do with perceived audio quality, WTF would you be trashing the quality of your audio files even further simply to use a perceived better format? It's akin to killing all chickens by starvation because raising them for food is cruel
Please read the posts before restating the obvious and spouting some rubbish.
The query was, can you transcode MP3 to ogg without any perceptual loss in quality.
The why is questionable, BUT if there is no perceptual loss in quality, then it becomes why not, personally I would re-encode all my mp3's to ogg's to cut the tie in one quick go.
No need to search for MP3's on my system again. That is all. A preffered format. As I state (and why should I reitterate?) I imagine the loss will not be that much.
Now leave it. ffs.
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AFAIK VmWare virtualizes the whole architecture, ... when you get to the time the suspended machine state will be resumed, it already ironed out the differences. YMMV.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
http:///http://ipodlinux.org/Main_Page>
I rest my case.
Compelling the entire geek community to respond with a resoundingly indifferent, "Oh."
Would they send out soul patches to everyone?
You two have too much time on your hands. Ultimately the situation boils down to this:
Your average mp3 encoder transforms audio from the time domain to frequency domain. Then, having done listening tests to develop a hearing model (psycho-acoustical) they take their psycho acoustical model and eliminate parts of the sound in certain situations. For example their listening tests may have indicated that nobody notices a 900 hz tone that is simultaneous with a 1000 hz and a 1300 hz tone. So they wipe the 900 hz tone, this is the lossy bit. Then they compress the left over data using standard compression techniques. If the psycho-acoustical model they used is good, then when decompressed and converted back to the time domain, you will think you are hearing the original audio. If their model is crap, then you'll hear ringing, warbling, and all kinds of artifacts. The problem with reencoding is that the model will recognize different patterns and remove more and more of the audio. For example, originally you removed the 900 hz signal, the second time through that is gone so it sees your 1 khz signal and your 1.3 khz signal and perhaps decides to remove the 1.3 khz signal because the 900 hz signal is missing and therefore you act in a different area of the model. So now you've lost two different frequency bands.
Ogg does the same type of thing. The real question is, is there a mathematical route from the time domain->frequency domain transform used by mp3 to the time domain->frequency domain transform used by ogg? If so, then it is possible to make a converter that will make an mp3 into an ogg and vice-versa without any data loss. The psycho-acoustical model is irrelevant, a good one will sound good however you encode the actual bits. The trick is to transform the data while skipping the lossy step.
Another way to think about this is to picture a jpeg. If you load it up in photoshop or gimp or paint or whatever, rotate it 90 degrees and then save it. You will have lost a little bit of the picture information. If you repeat this over and over, say a total of 12 times, you will have a picture with the same orientation as the original but will clearly be of much worse quality. However there is a mathematical transformation that will rotate the jpeg data 90 degrees without reencoding the data. You can do it 1200 times and the end result will be identical to the original.
I found some details on how the Vorbis algorithm works in the wikipedia article. It means nothing to me, but it appears you have the background to make heads or tails of it.
To answer the original question, hacking together a quick shell script that will do mp3 -> ogg shouldn't be that hard, and you could then use good old find with appropriate -prune options to exclude your game mp3s.
Just off the top of my head, I'm thinking something like "find . -name pathname -prune -o -exec mp3-to-ogg.sh {} \; "
http://www.research.microsoft.com/
Why not leapfrog these ideas and have a web provider like Yahoo or Google offer storage on their servers so that no device needs to be carried. In theory, the provider could also perform the updates to the OS and applications. Of course, web access would be required for this to work.
Great, except for the format specific headers, both use a Modified Discrete Cosine Transform, which is, in laymans terms:
Grab some signal (music) and represent it ina way that all the important audio information (within our hearing range, loud enough etc) is at one end, and all the less important (perceivable) information is at the other end.
Chop all the less important info off.
To decode, reverse the process, and the main stuff will be there, minus the fluff in the record grooves (the small bits of info... of fluff does make bangs and clicks... but bad analogy)
So in summation, the quality lost between the two shoudl not be that bad, as the two methods would target the same information from a raw wav data set.
Therefore, it should be not to painful to make the switch, but I will need to test to substantiate this.
I don't want to invest 4 hours to learn the Java sound API's right now (encode mp3, decode wav, store, reencode that wav to ogg, then back to wav, compare both wavs using java)
thanks for links and discussions.
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Can someone explain to me how this is the "next logical step"? Seems really really lame to me.
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
Of course it'll be even hotter if it's the tube driven iPod...
<shameless link back to something I posted before>
wow - so the mp3s really do sound warmer
</shameless link back to something I posted before>
You can adjust the virtual machine to have or not SSE3?
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
On my laptop, I run Fedora Core 4 from an external USB-powered drive. Since my Toshiba Satellite doesn't support booting from external USB drives, I boot from a customized CDROM when I want to use Fedora. (The CD uses ISOLINUX, and contains only the kernel and a slightly hacked-up initrd that loads the USB drivers before mounting the root partition from the external drive. It's not the fastest system in the world, but it otherwise works like a charm.)
In case anyone's wondering why I would want to do this... I'm in the process of switching my laptop from WinXP to FC4. I want to ensure all the goofy laptop hardware works reasonably well before "pulling the trigger" and wiping Windows off the system. The next hurdle to cross is getting the damn fan to work properly.
In one of the first "how to make the damn thing work" articles, the guy had put OSX under VMware and instructed VMware to "emulate" SSE3.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
I have been keeping VMWare virtual machines on my iPod for sometime now. I simply plug the iPod in to a computer (Windows) with VMWare loaded and I and boot the VM from the iPod.
The real interesting thing is that they are a few years behind where I am already with my Kaos BSD R&D. And they need at least 6gig, compared to a CD.
- Kaos games and encryption systems developer
You are wrong that we don't know how to make memory as fast as the CPU. It's that it's not cost effective to do so. It's also a case of decreasing returns. That's why you can get away with the different levels of cache which run at different speeds.
Awesome furniture, accessories and cabinetry in Santa Rosa, CA: http://humanity-home.com/