A MIDI Player on Eight Floppy Drives | Hacker News Reader

A MIDI Player on Eight Floppy Drives

kukuruku.co

46 pointssigna1116 comments

My personal contribution to the genre: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhChYJzw4FM&feature=youtu.be See link in description for build log and source code.

And one of my favorites from another artist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZGgymGg0Ns

I remember vividly the range of sounds a floppy drive could generate back in the day. It's high time somebody put this musical potential to good use :)

While the C source formatting is rather horrible, the resulting playback instrument is absolutely impressive. I almost fell from my chair laughing.

This is an awesome interpretation!

The idea for this dates back some years however, the first one I remember is a scanner playing Für Elise [0], and of course there is the Imperial March performed by three floppy drives [1].

There is also another performance (Bach's Toccata & Fugue) using eight floppies [2].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ftYO5J3ZZQ

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHCUuMeaTcU

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGSTYvx5c78

The sounds the drives produce are reminiscent of bowed strings, especially the one playing the bassline. It would be very cool to connect this to a midi controller and play it live.

I did this with a PC (and a MIDI keyboard rather than playing MIDI files) but never got it working with multiple channels. Well played.

That's very impressive. I saw this video recently that shows how to turn an old hard drive into a speaker (it works of a wav form, not midi though) with some simple tricks:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVPjQou42i8

What is the song he/she is playing? I wonder how the original sounds. Some of the channels sound rather muddy. Maybe something could be done to align upstrokes and downstrokes?

Metallica unforgiven

This might be the best version of this song ever made.

That's a hell of a racket! If Vlad wasn't single before this project he probably is now.

This is really entertaining. I wonder, why there isn't 12 floppies to cover all notes?

It appears that each floppy drive is capable of playing multiple pitches. The floppy drives are each playing a different voice/instrument.

It's not a floppy drive per note, but per channel. Every drive maps to a MIDI channel.

Dat overdriven bassline!

there has got to be a better way to write that Action() method..

Why?

Adding in additional abstractions would probably be unnecessary overhead for an embedded system. The code the author wrote, while a bit repetitive, maps fairly straightforwardly to assembly.

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