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.
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
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
> 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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
[+] [-] vertis|5 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] _b8r0|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] hn3333|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] t0mas88|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] k2enemy|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] dijit|5 years ago|reply
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).
Anyway. That was a nostalgia trip.
[+] [-] SergeyDruid|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vict00ms|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fb03|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] grishka|5 years ago|reply
We had cassette walkmans, then CD players, then mp3 players.
[+] [-] timonoko|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] grishka|5 years ago|reply
Author: uses Opus but puts an entire album on there.
[+] [-] hellotomyrars|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andai|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] scruffyherder|5 years ago|reply
It took over a week but it was eventually flagged, and tagged correctly.
I’m guessing those stories of faint music in the background being tagged are real.
[+] [-] userbinator|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] comradesmith|5 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] bArray|5 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] alt219|5 years ago|reply
Edit: Found its Wikipedia page! [0]
[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Router_Project
[+] [-] dwighttk|5 years ago|reply
Also deleting it a few days later to save space on my 4GB HD.
[+] [-] mhd|5 years ago|reply
- game boy cartridges (or even larger cartridge formats)
- zip discography disks (i.e. one disk per artist)
- small internal ram, transmission via infrared
- eprom chips
[+] [-] simias|5 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] andai|5 years ago|reply
Sneakernet, yet contactless, nice! The devices could exchange their most-listened tracks and overwrite the least-listened tracks.
[+] [-] dreamlayers|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Jedd|5 years ago|reply
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 ...
[+] [-] bakoo|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Symbiote|5 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Disc_Filing_System
(PS, it's 90mm. Odd that even outside the USA we said 3½ inches.)
[+] [-] tssva|5 years ago|reply
I started with a TRS-80 Model 1 with a Shugart SA-400 drive connected to an expansion interface. 85K capacity.
[+] [-] Theizestooke|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 082349872349872|5 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cI3tE9wNL5s (1985, JP)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GjOvzWJbFdA&t=20 (1989, SU)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=notKtAgfwDA&t=40 (1985, US)
(ok, he doesn't really have the hairstyle, but he does wear gloves)
[+] [-] ngcc_hk|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] menybuvico|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 082349872349872|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lostgame|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anfractuosity|5 years ago|reply
https://github.com/anfractuosity/turbodrive
I had the case 3d printed, but need to finish the electronic side of things.
I bought some music from - https://strudelsoft.bandcamp.com/ (which comes on a floppy disk :)
[+] [-] someperson|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LeoPanthera|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nitrogen|5 years ago|reply
Looks like this came up on HN before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19583531
[+] [-] walrus01|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] userbinator|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] edent|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] abbeyj|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dragonwriter|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Daniel_sk|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] terinjokes|5 years ago|reply
Blog post: https://terinstock.com/post/2018/09/Hardware-MIDI-Player-Par...
FOSDEM Talk: https://terinstock.com/talk/2019/02/Building-a-Hardware-MIDI...
[+] [-] unicornporn|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jmull3n|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] edent|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scruffyherder|5 years ago|reply
I revisited the experiment a few years ago here:
https://virtuallyfun.com/wordpress/2017/04/20/getting-first-...
Now I’m wondering why I didn’t go all the way and make a custom player...
[+] [-] k__|5 years ago|reply
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.