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Band Releases Album As Linux Kernel Module
netbuzz (955038) writes "A band called netcat is generating buzz in software circles by releasing its debut album as a Linux kernel module (among other more typical formats.) 'Are you ever listening to an album, and thinking "man, this sounds good, but I wish it crossed from user-space to kernel-space more often!" We got you covered,' the band says on its Facebook page. 'Our album is now fully playable as a loadable Linux kernel module.'"
Our album is now fully playable as a loadable Linux kernel module.
Yeah, that seems pretty safe. I'd love to load your album into kernel space. Seems legit.
This is the greatest thing I've seen all year, had to up my VM memory to 6GB to compile it though. Too bad the music isn't my favorite. Oh well, neat idea!
I made an app! Shoutium
https://raw.githubusercontent....
proof that music is just a bunch of numbers.. and you cant copyright, trademark, or patent, a number.
Nothing spells nerdom that compiling music in a kernel , that's some musical corn
They transcoded it a ton, don't expect FLAC or even mp3 v0. Seems more for publicity. "...came from .ogg files that were encoded from .wav files that were created from .mp3 files that were encoded from the mastered .wav files which were generated from ProTools final mix .wav files that were created from 24-track analog tape."
I made an app! Shoutium
I'd say publicity mission successfully.
localhost ~ # modprobe dafuq
Linux lead me astray.
I'll save you all the trouble. Their "music" sounds like one of those sleep CDs you hear them playing at incense shops that sell quartz "power crystals" and/or the soundtrack to Myst.
Here's their picture:
http://www.networkworld.com/gr...
The guy on the left clearly did the kernel bit.
The dude in the middle has a cello and tattoo so he's clearly getting laid and therefor has never heard of Linux.
The guy on the right... well look at his hat and shoes... he's way too busy putting imitation carbon fiber parts on his Mitsubishi Lancer to have time for programming.
Your welcome for the 10min of your life I saved you.
I wonder what they'll name the exploit centered around this module....
Is the module GPL'd, or does it taint the kernel?
On second thought (and without RTFM'ing) I'll go out on a limb and say that an album taints the kernel regardless of license.
Enjoy your 15 minutes.
A lot of it's meh, but plenty of it is interesting. I went ahead and bought the tape since it's only $12 after shipping with the coupon code, and it comes with the digital download of course.
What about an Emacs package? Or does the band not speak with a Lisp?
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
This is NOT music...
I could never understand why anyone would want to be like that.
"As netcat, Brandon Lucia (drums, Chango, computers), David Balatero (cello, computers), and Andrew Olmstead (synthesizer, computers) explore the intersection between technology, complexity, and free improvisation. netcat's music brings together seasoned performance on conventional instruments -- cello, synthesizers, and drums -- combining it with computer generated sounds and computer instruments, like the Chango, a novel synthesizer that is played with light.
The mixture of these ingredients is textural, long-form structured improvisations. netcat's music is the kind that calls for laying down on the floor with expensive headphones on and enjoying the solipsism. The flow of the round, sinusoidal bass of the Chango and synthesizer carry the listener on an electric current, through a confluence of sweeping, dramatic arcs on the cello and tympanic drumming. Among it all manifests speaking computers attempting, with futility, to master spoken language and a sonic embodiment of the flurry of bits and bytes traversing a computer network."
Translation: "We bought a bunch of really expensive, weird-ass MIDI controllers, and brought out a random string instrument from [middle|high] school so we could get the "explore the intersection of ___ and ___" music groupies ("explore the intersection" is music's "synergy" or "cloud" - meaningless catchphrase). We did so by playing a couple simple intervals really, really slowly, because we never figured out how to play above 30bpm with any of the aforementioned expensive, weird-ass MIDI controllers. We named everything after random linux terms and published as a kernel module in order to get some free publicity, which Slashdot dutifully provided."
I half suspect that if I actually nabbed a copy of their synth programs, I'd find that they just used default voices for it. Sadly I use less obscure programs and fewer weird-ass MIDI controllers, so I cannot tell for sure. Also I never want to waste another minute listening to that droning to compare.
You want some real "explore the intersection between technology and music"? Go listen to Machinae Supremacy - they combine modern hard-rock/heavy-metal with Commodore 64 chiptune, and it actually sounds good (regular personal taste disclaimers apply). Or any of the other dozens of chiptune crossover musicians - I can recommend "The Black Box" by aivi & surasshu for people who want more tranquil music that's still, y'know, music. And chiptune actually requires a good bit of technical knowledge to write, rather than simply using a computer as just a funny-sounding synthesizer.
They really wasted the opportunity to do something really geeky, like release the song as a network service that outputs via the loopback interface. Then you could play it by using netcat.
can't wait to see what happens with a kernel module coded by a microsoft employee [1] when released in the wild.
[1] http://brandonlucia.com/ guy a the left in the picture.
and i will build for you a live band in kernel space.
This repository contains the album's track data in source files, that (for complexity's sake) came from .ogg files that were encoded from .wav files that were created from .mp3 files that were encoded from the mastered .wav files which were generated from ProTools final mix .wav files that were created from 24-track analog tape.
So they went from wav -> mp3 -> wav.... for no good reason? Then down to what can only be assumed to be Vorbis.
Is here
The developers should check here for tips on how to compile binary data into things efficiently: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=embed+binary+in+executable
'Are you ever listening to an album, and thinking "man, this sounds good, but I wish it crossed from user-space to kernel-space more often!"
No, I've never thought that. Not once.
I thought it was MySpace...
There's a remix version available through kGraft. Remix without rebooting.
Does it come with the Sony rootkit included?
Yeah, that's totally what's wrong with this.
For all the mad pussy.
Is it from Sony perchance?
My first program:
Hell Segmentation fault
The last time someone's music got into my kernel it was Sony with a rootkit. At least these folks are open about nabbing root.
They really screwed the pooch on this deal. Since their name is 'netcat', I'm waiting for the song to be released via telnet server as ANSI music. That way I can netcat the netcat album with my cross platform old school Codepage 437 + PC speaker enabled terminal emulator from GNU, Linux, BSD, OSX, iOS, Android, Windows, MSDOS or even DR-DOS. Maybe I'd buy in if the cover art was a sick scroller.
In all seriousness: Any FLOSS publicity is good publicity. Windows or Mac folks can run Linux in a VM to try out the audio; It's not my cup of tea, but sort of neat.
He got his pantoes in a bunch over way less than this before.
aww come on Linus, i want to read another tirade.
Differentiation by publicizing your music as kernel module somehow says the artistic aspect must be wonderfully shit.
there is a nice issue on there github account, https://github.com/usrbinnc/ne...
They probably can't understand why anyone would want to be like you.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Hipster found
... is just a load of water with some fat and proteins mixed in. Why should it deserve any form of protection?
Idiot.
I'm going to wait for Theo de Raadt's Libre remix.
Since "Heartbleed" was found out, the NSA is looking deperately for new ways to get into your computer.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
Wow, I'm impressed. Do we now have to drop the old:
insmod
and now use
insrocker
Does this mean my Kernel will be tainted? With Rock and Roll?
"Is the Chief Priest an Offlian? Do dragons explode in the wood?"
...the guy on the right, was also the one who did the editing with a Macbook.
This is clearly a linux module owned by The SCO Group! They have the history chain of licenses to prove it!
Everyone turn your money over to The SCO Group right away to avoid being named defendant!
Sony BMG CD's from 2005-2007 do the same thing with Windows.
Nice to see someone is finally bringing this same capability to Linux.
Thanks, but no thanks, I prefer listening to /dev/urandom ..
If you distribute a movie as a kernel module, how would MPAA treat it? is it OK to do as it is software and not media.
I'd say my biggest complaint was the lack of a servo control for speed, meaning that a tape recorded on one deck might play faster or slower on another.
Actually, the speed was controlled. You could feed those little motors whatever voltage you wanted and they'd continue to spin at the same speed. The problem was that the path between the motor and the tape movement contained a lot of variables, in particular a smooth rubber belt on pulleys doesn't guarantee a fixed rotational ratio like you get with gears, though I imagine that design was necessary to allow the flywheel to actually do its job and ensure a constant speed.
The big issue was that the things often just weren't calibrated well. As a kid, I liked to play my keyboard along with the music, but every time I got a new cassette player I had to take the thing apart and adjust the potentiometer in the motor until the music was in tune. After that, most store-bought tapes would be in tune, and I imagine those that weren't were more due to artists recording their music without bothering to tune their guitars properly than to the recording speed being incorrect.
I never had any of the sound quality issues people love to complain about. I had one tape that I had listened to for years, even breaking my own rules about where my tapes go by putting it into "untrusted" players, like the one in my car. So one day I thought I had probably degraded the sound quality by now, and so I bought a new copy, but I found it to be indistinguishable from the old copy. When I switched to CDs, it wasn't even because of better sound quality, because they simply weren't better in that regard. ...and why should they be? Tape can be as good as you want it to be simply by increasing the tape speed.
> "Go listen to Machinae Supremacy"
Nice. Read your comment, and discovered a cool band I'd never heard of! Thanks man.
What will freetards think of next? This album cannot play on a 2.4, or a 2.6 kernel. I can take my CDs and play them on Windows 95 though. Linux fail.
Sometimes I wish there were some normal musicians using Linux and that was publicised instead of these hacks. The fact that these guys get attention and regular musicians don't tells me more about the lack of Linux use in music than anything else, and that's fucking sad. Linux sucks, stop promoting it until it gets more use by pro users.