The floppy disk music scene | Hacker News Reader

The floppy disk music scene

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I'm currently working on a 2HD 3.5 inch floppy disk release of a podcast episode which has taken me down an interesting rabbit hole of low-bitrate audio codecs, floppy disk aesthetics and label design.

The episode I'm releasing is 1h40m long, which sounds like it couldn't possibly fit in 1.44MB, but there's an obscure but free codec mostly used by digital HAM radio enthusiasts called Codec2 [1] which can encode human voice in as low as 700bit/s (315KB/hr). At that quality setting it sounds like complete garbage, although still barely intelligible, and there are no readily available media players for it (there's not even an established file format) so I'm having to include complicated ffmpeg instructions in a README to get people to play it, but I think it all adds to the charm.

Funnily enough after searching for days for how to fit the original episode in a floppy (tried low-bitrate MP3, Opus and AAC, all of which fail at the task), and after discovering Codec2 almost by chance, I only then came across an article titled "Codec2: a whole Podcast on a Floppy Disk" [2] which I probably would've found if I had started by searching "podcast in a floppy".

1: https://github.com/drowe67/codec2

2: https://auphonic.com/blog/2018/06/01/codec2-podcast-on-flopp...

Wouldn'it make more sense to release the transcription as floppy and let receiver use text to speech apps?

I thought of that as a plan B if I couldn't make the audio fit, but practicality is not so much the goal. The episode is released online at full quality anyway and almost nobody has a floppy drive these days. It's more about having a physical release that listeners can get as a cool looking commemorative item, and preferably one that doesn't cheat (by not actually containing the episode).

What would make sense would be to record it in pristine quality and put it on youtube / spotify etc. This is not for making sense but for art's sake. Working with limitations, pushing the limits. Expanding knowledge. Sometimes gaining cred within a community. Joy of tinkering, curiosity etc.

Oh Codec2, that's fun!

You could also try to run Lyra 2 on a reduced bitrate to see if it can compare. It's more CPU hungry, but it might be fun...

https://opensource.googleblog.com/2022/09/lyra-v2-a-better-f...

There's also Meta's EnCodec and Vocos at 1.5 kbps, Vocos is amazing: https://gemelo-ai.github.io/vocos/ So if you format the floppy to 1970 Kilobyte (with the dos tool 2MF 3.0) you could fit around 3 hours on it. Enough to tell the listener about your life story, your most important values, your loves and life lessons and more wisdom for future generations.

Long ago I encoded speech in acelp.net wma / realaudio4/5 at 6.5 kbps. That was good enough and better then mp3 speech compression, in these times with a relative abundance of bandwidth or diskspace it's not really necessary.

With whisperspeech you could fit and read the bible from a floppy (compressed with for example the PPM text compression codec), 7 days of 12 hours of speech each GPT4 estimated - and you can read it too! State of the art LLM exegesis based on the latest historical-critical methods and theology takes a bit more memory though.

"I'm currently working on a 2HD 3.5 inch floppy disk release of a podcast episode"

Out of curiosity..why?

My podcast hit a milestone and I wanted to make something to celebrate it that I could send to some listeners. For a few reasons I decided to go with floppy disks.

I have three floppy albums in my collection, and all three had different approaches to fitting an album on a floppy. Namely:

- one is vaporwave, and it's in 24kbps mp3 iirc (need to dig out the floppy drive to check) - another one is chiptune, and the floppy has the source .mod files. They take about 100kB of the floppy I think — good for another 12 albums or so. - my favorite one is a split album by two grindcore/noisecore bands. The songs are just very short.

I remember Lizardking (Gustaf Grefberg, composer for what is now Starbreeze Studios) used to distribute his early music on "musicdisks", bootable Amiga floppies with the tracks in MOD format and a player program. The module music scene fascinated me with its ability to distribute sampled music in a form that took up tens or hundreds of KiB. Plus the often synthesized, somewhat bitcrushed sound of the era was an aesthetic in its own right.

Was Lizardking a pioneer in that regard? I had quite a collection of musicdisks back in the day but never wondered about their origin. It just made sense that musicians got to strut their stuff the same way the coders and 'graphicians' did.

https://open.spotify.com/artist/4rzYgqTqx9x91va7Y5Chyx?si=0h...

If anyone wants to hear what Yasuyuki Uesugi sounds like and they don't have a glorious 1.44MB floppy drive anymore.

I recently bought a minidisc recorder to record Hearts of Space from my FM tuner and it was a blast. Now I'm looking for an audio CD recorder. There's something magical about having a disc of something compared to files on a computer or streaming.

Also https://yasuyukiuesugi.bandcamp.com :)

You may also enjoy listening to Hakon Soreide's work. This is from just a few days ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfnIAf7T-PQ

There should be a mandatory warning before sending people to accountwalled links.

This feels incomplete without a mention of the amazing Floppotron 3.0.

My favorite performance:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-WakfBNHD0

How it works:

https://silent.org.pl/home/2022/06/13/the-floppotron-3-0/

Before reading the article, I was really surprised of the title, but then I realized it was not floppy disk drive music scene.

We're not there yet for the Floppontron.

Back in college they were throwing away tons of floppy drives. I wanted to take one and turn it into a floppy music deck for my car to play these, as a sort of statement about the obsolescence of tech. Sadly I didn’t have quite the hardware skills (still don’t) to follow through.

Back in my swapping (demoscene term for sending wares on disk to your contacts) I used to make mix-disk with modules, chiptunes (AHX (then THX) SID, mostly)), you could put a lot stuff that way (and the XPK compressors could take even 50% off original size)

This year I picked up an Akai S20 sampler and have been using it to make beats. It uses 1.44MB floppies for storage, and this limitation really forces you to make decisions and stop wasting time.

Demo of the S20 floppy disk workflow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMDRT_0Nt0I

FYI (or others using retro equipment with floppy disks) there's a cheap floppy disk emulator called Gotek that can be connected in place of your 3.5" drive and has an USB connector where you can put a thumb drive with disk images.

For that device there's an Open Source firmware project called FlashFloppy [0] that enhances its features. And I've found today that there's an Open Hardware reimplementation [1] of the Gotek hardware that's compatible with the FlashFloppy Firmware.

  0: https://github.com/keirf/flashfloppy
  1: https://github.com/SukkoPera/OpenFlops

This would probably work well with LoFi black metal.

Oxygenfad released an album on Diskettes in 2004. There were 20 copies at the old underground Montreal music CD ESOTERIC.

I’m disappointed this wasn’t about a whole scene of artists making music from floppy drive noises.

https://youtu.be/RLXQpJgZklk

Dude I used to work with has a midi-to-(floppy|hd|printer|scanner) project. It sounds pretty good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cabzXe8LLvo

Interesting, but 1.4mb is unfortunately not enough for a full song in mp3 format at decent quality. Opus could get you to 3mins at good quality or 4mins at tolerable. Just tried it, 42k bitrate gets a 4:23 song down to floppy size at “transistor radio” quality. A 3:16 song at 52k sounds decent—probably forget it’s compressed if not actively doing an A/B test.

Believe a floppy pairs better with a clever midi file and a quality sequencer. :-D

Maybe they are distributing mods. I sampled a few random files at modarchive.org and they are all on the order of few hundred kilobytes.

As the sibling comment mentioned, MOD file formats (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Module_file) are a good compromise between "only storing the music" like in MIDI files (which means you have no control whatsoever over how it will sound when replayed) and size limitations - they store the instruments as samples in the file, which saves a lot of space compared to MP3 et al, which store the whole song as a "sample" (despite MP3 using lossy compression).

The article doesn't mention that, only mp3.

Another alternative would be music programming languages. There was a thing for a while with posting SuperCollider tracks as 140 character tweets. A floppy would be plenty of space for full albums of music. There are also wrappers for it in more normal programming languages, like Overtone (using Clojure) or Sonic Pi (Ruby), but the original SCLang is possibly more compact.

https://supercollider.github.io/

https://supercollider.github.io/sc-140

Previous discussion 14 years ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=992231 (22 comments)

Same as demoscene: use samples, mods. If you don't use too big samples you might even have a dos mod player in the floppy.

Given a large enough neural network, I'm quite confident music could be compressed much - MUCH - more than traditional methods.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/11/metas...

Article mentions 6 kb/s

1.5 kbps with Vocos and Meta's EnCodec, voice samples here, but I wonder how music would sound. https://gemelo-ai.github.io/vocos/

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