Tangent. I had a Minidisc player for a while circa 1997 (bit hazy). It was so awesome. I spent a lot of time putting tracks on the minidiscs.
I always wanted to be able to use it with a computer to store files as well, alas that required a special drive. While it existed never really took off (at least in Australia).
Memory chips might be the future, but minidiscs still look cooler. Cool enough for Neo to sell one in the Matrix :D
I bought a Sony MD-N707 not too long back which I'm using as a nice way to chill out without screens, and for recording Shortwave radio overnight off a Sony ICF-SW7600GR world band radio. The MD-N707 has a cool maintenance mode feature accessed via a Konami code that lets you patch an EEPROM to enable features from other models.
My only gripe with NetMD is that you can put things onto MD from a computer, but it's an analogue trip back for recordings. This was an architectural decision due to DRM restrictions. One day I'd like to have a go at trying to bypass this, but it looks like a massive pain in the hole and I only have one MD recorder.
Back in the day it was easy to make digital copies from CD to MD using an optical (toslink) cable. This method would preserve the track markers accurately which was hugely convenient! It wasn't lossless, of course, since MD is itself a compressed format, but the results were pretty good compared to say the MP3s of the era.
I believe Minidisc was also the medium of choice in "Strange Days", a pretty good and still very relevant movie that gets mentioned rarely for some reason.
And then in the years after I found out that there is an open source firmware for them at rockbox.org, contributed to the project for a few years until at some point the iPhone (3? 4? something around there) with Spotify completely replaced my MP3 player needs.
Me too! I used to love minidiscs back in the late 90s. I started out with a Sony MZ-R30 and moved on to a half a dozen other models. I was very lucky that I was able to convince a dozen or so friends to adopt minidiscs so we had a nice network for creating and trading discs.
I even ran a website devoted to equipment (not nearly as successful as minidisc.org). Now I'm nostalgic. It is really too bad that Sony kept the ecosystem so locked down. It was far superior to fragile audio CDs.
I had exactly the same desire. It’s crazy how locked down the minidisc ecosystem was though.
I remember playing with the Sony software to put tracks on my minidisc player, encoding then with AAC to get better compression. The thing felt great to use, much better than early MP3 players (the USB thumb drive style ones) but they were superior in nearly every way that mattered. (You could store files on them, more tracks, more battery life).
What I most liked about the portable Minidisc players at the time was how much playtime you would get out of a single AA battery. on the ballpark of 20-30 hours, not kidding.
Being from a country where minidisc was never a thing, I sometimes wonder what was it like to use a technology that no one around you ever had at the time. And I mean I'm not sure you could buy any of the minidisc stuff even if you specifically went looking for it.
We had cassette walkmans, then CD players, then mp3 players.
I saw floppy-disk Walkman in 1961 in Helsinki. It was a dictaphone using brown circular pieces of floppy plastic. A doctor was using it, trying to decide if I had tuberculosis or tapeworm. I had rickets.
My first thought when I saw the title and the picture: oh, it won't be that bad — you could use Opus to compress a song with passable quality to fit on a floppy.
Author: uses Opus but puts an entire album on there.
A proxy for that might be running it through eg. Shazam, I think they use similar tech.
From what little I've heard they make a spectrogram (frequency, intensity, time) and plot the peaks into a point cloud. Most of those should survive even the heaviest audio compression.
The sample 64k MP3 is 452KB, or over 1/3 of a floppy, yet is less than 57 seconds long and corresponds to a rate of 8KB/s. The fact that Opus can encode the same quality (or lack thereof...) with less than 1KB/s is amazing. To me, it sounds only slightly worse than music played over a POTS line.
I think the author may have gone: wav -> opus -> MP3. With the MP3 bitrate chosen to ensure no further quality loss.
I don't think from the provided MP3 we can tell if that is equivalent to the encoded opus format. We would need to encode to both from wav to make that comparison
Could you not just unpack the opus file into a pure uncrompressed .wav which I'm pretty sure all browsers will support. Or if you don't mind dropping legacy-IE support, FLAC would be an option.
Or would the extra bandwidth be enough to be a worry?
I really like this! I want to see it get a little easier to be carried around, but I want to build one! I'll be able to use my Sony Mavica to take pictures on floppy disks and my floppy-walkman to listen to music from floppy disks!
Now I also wonder what other horrendous uses of floppy disks there could be... I'm thinking it could be fun to store server web pages (without caching)... Or maybe to play some video feedback?
Around 1996-97, there was a Linux-based firewall/router that booted from a single 1.44MB diskette. iirc, it needed a very small amount of
RAM too, something like only 8MB. The diskette could be used with write-protect enabled to prevent accidental (or malicious for that matter) modifications to the diskette contents. I believe it also had an SMTP relay. It was particularly useful for sharing dial-up and DSL connections at a time when commercial solutions would’ve been much more expensive than a stripped down repurposed spare computer with no hard drive. A bit hard to imagine now, but back then it was pretty fantastic to have an Internet connection shared between computers on a home or small business network.
Most Game Boy cartridges are just a NOR chip accessed through a parallel interface, so the only difficult part would be building the connector, then you could just bitbang to get to the data.
Unless of course you want to actually play the audio on the GameBoy, in which case the very weak CPU and unsuited SPU will make it difficult to achieve anything resembling proper audio. Of course that didn't stop people from trying, with quite impressive results given the limitations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQLTYe0Gn70
Similarly, there have been photo cameras that used floppies for image storage, and I'm not talking about sony's Cybershoot cameras which stored photos as actual files - I'm talking cameras which just stored photos as analog signal directly on the floppy, in NTSC format!
Cool, wasn't aware it was possible to store an analog signal on a floppy using an unmodified disk drive. However, going from how often you hear the stepper motor in the video, the disk would fill up pretty quickly - I wonder how much analog music you could fit on a floppy with some optimization (slower rotation, tracks spaced more closely until crosstalk becomes an issue, maybe a spiral track like on a CD). My gut feeling is that you could fit more than 30 minutes on there...
In reality, inner tracks are shorter. I can't easily find the inner diameter, but from pictures it looks like it's about 1/3 the outer diameter. So the track lengths (circumference) should grow linearly from 1/3 to 100% of the outer diameter, which means the total track length should be 2/3 of 20 meters or ~13 meters.
To sum all that up, with 80 tracks, there seems to be about 13 meters of linear space the head can travel across, or about 15% of the length an audio cassette uses for 30 minutes. If you recorded at the same linear speed as a cassette, you'd get 15% of 30 minutes.
And there are a handful of floppy formats that use more than 80 tracks (one even uses 240), so let's assume 160 tracks is possible. So double again to 60% of 30 minutes.
And that's just one side of the floppy, so using both sides means you can double again to get 120% of 30 minutes. So yeah, it seems possible! (Which incidentally is NOT the answer I was expecting.)
If the 160 tracks thing doesn't work out, you could probably compensate slowing the rotation more.
On a side note, the two-sided thing creates the potential problem of a gap at the 15-minute mark. Apparently there are read/write heads on both sides (https://computer.howstuffworks.com/floppy-disk-drive2.htm), so I guess you could do the transition by recording a few seconds of audio on both sides, then cross-fading between them. In other words, start at the inner edge of the disk, reading from one side for 15 minutes as you slowly move the head to the outer edge of the disk, then cross-fade to the other head and continue back for another 15 minutes back toward the inner edge of the disk. You would need to have a good method for being sure you make this transition at the right time, though.
Or you can always just record 15 minutes of stereo sound, reading each channel from one side of the floppy.
> A floppy disk can hold a maximum of 1,457,664 Bytes.
Ahhh, the kids of today.
Having started with the 133mm 1541 on the Commodore 64, with its double-your-disk-capacity-with-a-hole-punch, and then onto the Amiga with its 89mm disks of 880KB capacity, and then working on Honeywell front end processors in the early 1990's with their 203mm disks with around 240KB ...
Still have my doubled C64 floppies, of which some were horribly scarred by the big blunt scissors I started out with.
You could also convert Amiga floppies from single to double density by adding a hole, giving you 1760kB. I didn't have money for quality disks, and found that "punching" the hole with a hot soldering iron lead to less problems than using what was probably the wrong bit in my dad's drill.
RISC OS is the original OS for the ARM chip, and the Raspberry Pi can run it natively. It apparently doesn't support floppy disc drives (the Pi lacks the interface, and USB drives appear like USB memory sticks to the OS). If it did, the ADFS (Advanced Disc Filing System) would format discs to 800 or 1600KB.
Well, I started with a VIC20 and a tape drive -- but in terms of floppy disks, that wasn't until sometime after the C64 arrived.
My neighbour was a developer working in assembler, producing games for the TRS-80, and my first 'real' (as in monies being handed over) job was as a tape-copying, paper-folding, inserting-both-into-a-ziplock-bag monkey.
The original comment was regarding floppy drives so I mentioned the first computer with a floppy drive I used. The first computer I would have used was my father's Heathkit ET-3400 microprocessor learning system in 1976. That required each time typing in the machine code for the high/low game I played on it. The TRS-80 Model 1 was purchased a year or so later and originally had a tape drive.
Reminds me of the Neuromancer computer game sound track by DEVO https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNmpTIMxmrU (granted this was only heard during the intro, the actual game ost was a chiptune remix)
Hatsune Miku (時祭 イヴ) concerts are a thing now, as is synthwave (retro 80's). Now all we're missing are manipulative governments engaged in secret wars, and the mecha?
This reminds me of the days in high school of compressing the hell out of my MP3's to 64kbps or such just to fit as many on my 64(?)MB generic MP3 player at the time. What an adorable project.
Wasn't there a way for Linux to format 3 1/4 inch floppy disks beyond the standard 1.44MB all the way to 2MB? Or was that simply using a compressed filesystem?
I seem to recall the Windows 95 or 98 install floppies being 1.68MB each, but you could go further. If I remember right this involved either reducing redundancy in the FAT or increasing cluster size.
While they did tweak things like the number of root entries and such, the main way to get more space was simple to cram more sectors onto each track than the standard format (and make sure they weren't using cheap floppies that couldn't work correctly with the extra data density).
Some cheap/grotty/dying floppy drives were not happy either the extra data density either, though that was a rare problem (anecdata: I experienced one drive that didn't like the format but would read everything else I expected it to).
There was also an official standard for 2.88MB floppy disks which never caught on much, and by the time it would have been useful the zip disk, ls100 and CD-R drives killed it. Finding media for it now would probably be difficult and costly.
The floppy drive seen in the adapter with the small ribbon cable is the same from x86 PC laptops around 2002. I don't think any slimline type 2.88MB drives were made, only desktop size.
Yes, the ultimate (unformatted) capacity of the medium is rougly 2 million bytes, and includes the sector headers as well as the gaps to account for rotational speed variance. The calculation is as follows:
A 1.44M drive nominally writes at 500Kbit/s and spins at 300RPM, i.e. one track takes 200ms and 100Kbit are written. There are 80 tracks so 8000Kbit on one side, or 16000Kbit on two sides, corresponding to 2Mbit in total.
By writing "long sectors" that take up the whole track, omitting almost all the overhead and gaps, and using up to 82 tracks, the 2M utility I linked in another comment here manages to reach very close to that limit.
In the 90s there used to be a web page for linux describing all the possible physical formats and one interesting side effect was changes in average kilobytes/sec transfer rate.
Obviously more tracks simply took longer to read more data in a linear fashion but there were weird interactions where long sectors increased average bandwidth, mostly.
I'm old enough to manually set interleave parameters on hard disks in the early 80s, so that was interesting. I don't remember interleave optimizing on floppies but I may just forget.
Thanks! I spent over a week trying to track down when the bug was introduced and ended up git-bisecting to the commit I already thought was interesting. My mistake for not checking first. If it had taken any longer, I probably would have lost all momentum for the project.
When real audio 2.0 was released it was possible to get the encoder. So back in the mid 90s I ripped Dark aside of the Moon to wave (I had a massive SCSI disk) and transcoded it to the smallest settings. I got it down to two 5 1/4” disks.
250MB per disk and only half the size of a regular CD mp3 players, which were the way to go back then, because everything else didn't have enough space or was too expensive.
Ah, I was working on a similar idea when I was in upper secondary school. But I was unable to do get what I want with my very limited electronics knowledge back then :)
I was thinking of storing and playing the data in an analog way, pretty much like a regular compact cassette meant for audio. I thought it was a better idea after seeing audio casettes can store 60/90 minutes of audio but they can hold only very little digital data (I had a commodore that I found in my grandma's cellar and those casettes were my unit of measure)
> Sadly, the Pi Zero doesn’t have an an audio out jack. But the USB floppy drive is pretty big, so we don’t lose much space by going for a full-sized Pi.
You could use a ZeroW which has bluetooth, and a bluetooth-to-3.5 adaptor to allow a wired connection. That would take less space than a full-bodied Pi and add extra parts to the hack for a bit more "dear [deity], why would you?" goodness!
FWIW, PCM5102 boards off ebay are about $5 and work perfectly with the pi0. They don't support hardware mixing or volume control, but the sound quality is surprisingly good.
Or you could store all your music files in the sd card and store playlists in the floppies. Then, inserting a disk would only be a fancy (and wonderfully inconvenient) way of choosing what to play.
The very first mp3 I got my hands on, I took home from uni on three floppy discs. It was jawdropping that a whole song could fit in that small a space.
This really makes me want to see someone recreate the Sony Mavica digital camera using a Pi and a USB floppy drive. Those things were awesome back around 1999. Would be pretty straight forward.
I always wanted to be able to use it with a computer to store files as well, alas that required a special drive. While it existed never really took off (at least in Australia).
Memory chips might be the future, but minidiscs still look cooler. Cool enough for Neo to sell one in the Matrix :D
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kU3BceoMuaA