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July 15th, 2024

Releasing an Album on Floppy Disk

Michael Gale compressed his music album onto a 1.4MB floppy disk using ffmpeg but faced size issues. He planned to use Opus encoder for extreme compression, following Terence Eden's advice. Gale referenced Eden's blog post for guidance.

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Releasing an Album on Floppy Disk

Michael Gale shared his technical process of fitting his music album onto a 1.4MB floppy disk. Using ffmpeg, he concatenated the 10 songs into one file named OH-016-COMPLETE.wav. However, the resulting file was too large for the floppy disk. Following Terence Eden's suggestion, he planned to use the Opus encoder for extreme compression to fit the music onto the floppy disk. Gale expressed excitement about the potential results of this compression method. The article details the steps taken, including installing ffmpeg on a Pop OS machine and running the concatenation command successfully. The tracklist of the album "Glamour Boy" was also provided, with a total runtime of 33 minutes and 9 seconds. Throughout the process, Gale referenced Eden's blog post on a floppy-disk Walkman, highlighting the influence of tech-savvy bloggers on his work.

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Link Icon 18 comments
By @bux93 - 7 months
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...

By @rob74 - 7 months
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.
By @al_borland - 7 months
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.

By @omoikane - 7 months
Related:

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

By @eimrine - 7 months
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.
By @larme - 7 months
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

By @bitwize - 7 months
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
By @lagniappe - 7 months
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 ;)

By @maitola - 7 months
Upvote just for the title and idea
By @cstone - 7 months
Cool! There are also folks on Bandcamp who have floppy releases as a thing. Here's one: https://powerlunch.bandcamp.com/merch
By @m_st - 7 months
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.
By @levidos - 7 months
You can release them as midi files, those would easily fit on a floppy..
By @KingOfCoders - 7 months
OT loved disc magazines of the 80s
By @goodburb - 7 months
Using TSAC should render a much higher quality: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39975331
By @justsomehnguy - 7 months
> 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
By @ahartmetz - 7 months
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.