Releasing an Album on Floppy Disk

Music disks used to be a thing in the 90's demo scene.

Like this 111 KB rendition of "Axel F" they did not sound like crap. https://modarchive.org/index.php?request=view_by_moduleid&qu...

Now I wonder how much music you could fit on a floppy if you recorded the analog signal? A double-sided floppy drive would be perfect for stereo, one side for each channel. Maybe use a spiral track like on CDs instead of the usual concentric tracks? But of course that would require custom-made (or heavily modified) floppy drives, and it would sound about the same as a cassette.

The last time I put music on a floppy disk was 20 years ago, trying to get a single mp3 off an old Windows 95 computer with no USB or network support. I had to use WinRAR to split the file up across multiple disks, move it to a more modern system, and stitch it back together. It worked, if I never wanted to use another floppy disk after that. I wasn’t completely successful, but that’s due to work stuff that couldn’t ve avoided, and was far less annoying.

I will have to pass the floppy disk music scene. The idea brings back annoying memories.

Related:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39534616 - The floppy disk music scene (2024-02-28)

Having a scull on an album cover reminds me some dissident vinil recordings made on used x-ray negatives typically with somebody's bones photographed on it.

Not the same but there's a netlabel called 20kbps[0]. Most of their albums are mp3s around 10-20 MB in total.

[0]: https://20kbps.net/index2.htm

Funny this should come out a day or two after I downloaded and played Alcatraz's "Memorial Songs" musicdisk (actually 2 disks, featuring tunes by Lizardking, who was pretty much the Brian Eno of the demoscene): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4mskWhgAVM

I will add the music is really catchy.

edit: I Am Not Afraid samples what is imo the best hold-music of all time at the end. nice touch ;)

Upvote just for the title and idea

Cool! There are also folks on Bandcamp who have floppy releases as a thing. Here's one: https://powerlunch.bandcamp.com/merch

I have great memories of downloading MIDI files found with Altavista, Yahoo or even something like midi.com, then putting them on a floppy and have them play back on my Technics KN-2000 keyboard. Then MP3 happened.

You can release them as midi files, those would easily fit on a floppy..

OT loved disc magazines of the 80s

Using TSAC should render a much higher quality: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39975331

> My final diskettes will contain a single song, so the first thing I need to do is glue these 10 songs together into one. In other words, I need to concatenate them.

> To do that I'll use ffmpeg, a free and open source audio and video encoding suite.

> Superuser user, evilsoup, explains very clearly how to concatenate files using ffmpeg.

... or you can just issue

    copy input1.wav+input2.wav+input3.wav+input4.wav output.wav

I'm disappointed that they didn't use DMF https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_Media_Format to get about 17% more space for higher, uh, "quality".

DMF was on HN a couple of weeks ago or so, but I can't find it.