README

I wrote this over a few evenings back in 2005 when i first got my Sony 
NW-HD5. I still own the device, only now i use MP3FileManager, which I 
run on my Windows box at work. Hence why i stopped hacking this code. 

A note on the name - If you've ever had to use Sonic Stage, you'll 
understand. I used it for a week. Apologies! 

It's mid-2011 now, and looking back... all of it is quite, quite bad. 

Well, utterly awful. More so than usual... 

I'm annoyed I didn't do a better job with the ID3 tagging - I should 
have just written it out and changed the first 2 bytes instead of badly 
rebuilding it. 

It's also hillariously not suitable for anything other than x86. 

I'm not sure why I chose KDE's taglib at the time. I cleaned up an 
orphaned taglib package on my box at home, which is what suddenly 
reminded me I had this project sat there doing nothing. 

I suspect it was chosing Taglib that made me go C++ rather than just C, 
but... the code is awful. Please don't judge me. It was a long time ago, 
and most of the time spent was analysing the dat files in a hex editor. 
I've made no attempt to clean any of it up, but I'm quite surprised at 
my liberal use of const everywhere. That makes me feel just a bit 
better. Although I deserve a serious kicking for all those uninitialsed 
variables, etc. 

I've no idea why I decided to very badly pad strings instead of 
converting to unicode. I did know it was UTF, my problem at the time was 
that very few rippers on linux correctly wrote UTF in the ID3 tags - see 
here for more details. 
http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/amarok/2006-June/022200.html or google for 
more examples. Grip was my ripper of choice, and is still wrong today. 

i've no idea what this is in main, so don't ask: int missing[] = 
{0x0F,0x62,0xC8,0xBC,0xA1,0x15,0x1F,0xC1,0x49,0x0F,0x68}; 

All I can say is it doesn't appear to be used, I guess it was some poor 
attempt at debugging something at some point. 

I had originally used brute force to deduce the encryption key for my 
device, by using sonic stage to transfer an mp3 of null bytes. I then 
copied the resulting OMA file back across and XOR's with null bytes to 
get the key. 

However, it seems you can get it in two (much better!) ways, see 
http://www.waider.ie/hacks/workshop/c/mple/FILE_FORMAT_v2.txt for 
details. 

Side note: I think it's cool we all worked this out in different ways 
arond the same time. It's a shame we couldn't all get together back 
then. 

Instructions for use: Back up your OMGAUDIO folder! It did work, and 
possibly still does. After a lot of trial and error, the only important 
dat file to alter was 04cntinf.dat. By inserting the tags of the new 
files into there, the player would rebuild the other files (seemingly) 
correctly on its own. This was the minimum required to get it playing 
music. 

Final note on the Sony NW-HD5: I like this device. Other than their 
idiotic attempt to ruin it by trying to control what goes on it, it's 
genuinely good at what it does. I still get in excess of 15 hours 
playback, and it's my player of choice for long haul flights.