
Vaporwave’s Mini-Boom of Floppy Disk Releases - pshaw
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/vaporwave-floppy-disk-trend-666085/
======
chippy
Vaporwave is a huge genre which covers a wide range of styles. Here are two
favourites which show different styles. From down tempo electro:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GW6sLrK40k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GW6sLrK40k)
to new reworking of 80s pop songs:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jynPLTeBaFc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jynPLTeBaFc)

The main thing that ties in the different styles is the slight feeling of
nostalgia and the internet subculture central to it. The playfulness with the
subculture is a core element of the subculture. "Vaporwave is dead" is an
example of such. It's post-hipster in a way as hipsters are too serious,
always searching for the authenticity, where vaporwave will copy and rework
stuff. It's kind of close to the way Discordianism worked - is it a music
genre thats disguised as a joke or a joke thats disguised as a music genre?

~~~
bane
One of the things that, to me, makes it such a vibrant genre is the huge
emergent tree of sub-genres that seemingly sprout out of it on a weekly basis.
This means that if you're able to accept the basic premise of the genre,
there's probably some sub-genre that you can get into.

It reminds me of what we now call the EDM scene, but back in the 90s when it
was "Techno" or just "electronic music". There was an attempt to try to map
out those sub genres in a great flash presentation:
[http://techno.org/electronic-music-guide/](http://techno.org/electronic-
music-guide/)

Since it's valuable, and we're still early in it, it would be great to also do
this with vaporwave.

Another important part of the scene is that it's not _just_ a music scene, but
a more general cultural movement with visuals, palettes, clothes, food, tv and
so on. And on one of the powers of it is that it can not only create new
stuff, but draw on an entire cultural period that's already happened.

~~~
aphextron
>Another important part of the scene is that it's not just a music scene, but
a more general cultural movement with visuals, palettes, clothes, food, tv and
so on.

I’m trying to imagine “vaporwave food” now, and the closest I can get is those
weird little Kid Cuisine TV dinners with the frozen blue stuff for desert.

~~~
theNJR
I went to this food... thing... in Palm Springs a few weeks ago. We watched
Sitcoms and ate food inspired by them. They went way back to 1960s shows, but
it would have been 1000x more fun (for me) had it been full on vaporwave. We
were all dressed up, the servers sang and did trivia. It was awesome and now
makes me want to throw a Vaporwave food event.

------
21
> Cassette players, they’re not really manufactured anymore, and the prices
> are going up on used ones

Tascam just released a new deck cassette player, with USB:

[https://ask.audio/articles/tascam-announces-202mkvii-dual-
ca...](https://ask.audio/articles/tascam-announces-202mkvii-dual-cassette-
deck-with-usb-for-next-generation-tape-heads)

~~~
KozmoNau7
They probably mean _quality_ cassette players. Even that Tascam is made using
standard cheap mechanisms, it only has the most basic noise reduction (Dolby
B) and no tape type selection.

To even come close to justifying its $500 price tag, it should have a proper
high-quality direct drive 3-head mechanism, Dolby B, C _and_ S, as well as HX-
Pro, at the very minimum to take the cassette tape seriously as a medium for
music.

A Type IV "metal" tape with Dolby S and recorded using HX-Pro can sound
seriously good, but nobody wants to sink the money into doing it, when they
can just sell crappy Type I tapes at hipster prices.

~~~
vertexFarm
The tape deck manufacturers today know what's up. Nobody is trying to get
serious hi-fi out of tapes anymore. There are cheaper and more effective ways
of doing that today.

People using tapes are looking specifically for the imperfections of the
medium. Trying to get perfect reproduction out of one would be like selling a
synthesizer that only produces the most perfect, clean sine wave. Nobody wants
that. The distortion is the instrument.

~~~
KozmoNau7
No of course not, it would be a waste of money to force cassette tapes into
having decent sound quality. Anyone who cares about that is going to be using
either lossless files or a good modern lossy codec.

What people want is the shitty version of cassette tape, the one they grew up
listening to on their birthday present portable tape players. Probably tapes
recorded on a middling-quality player from an LP.

And I get it. If I were to buy a classic car of some sort, you can absolutely
bet it would have a tape deck, and I would gladly use it.

~~~
21
> the one they grew up listening

The biggest market for cassettes today is for people who never experienced
them before.

------
forkLding
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQkPcPqTq4M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQkPcPqTq4M)

^above video got me started on vaporwave

~~~
nerdponx
Isn't this the album that started vaporwave as whole?

~~~
badpenny
That's Chuck Person's Eccojams Vol. 1.

~~~
samfriedman
Yes, which was interestingly a side project of Daniel Lopatin, better known by
his experimental electronic moniker Oneohtrix Point Never.

~~~
meowface
One of the greatest electronic musicians of the decade, in my opinion.

------
JansjoFromIkea
Making something that can fit on a floppy disc is pretty cool restriction to
give yourself imo.

Do you just cripple the bitrate to squeeze a 3+ minute song on, do you stick
to super short songs or do you find alternate means of maximising the space
(I'm thinking potentially a mixture of midi files with some guidelines, and
super low encoded vocals)

Floppy discs are much more aesthetically pleasing than cassettes (although
maybe not cassette boxes) as a decorative thing imo too.

~~~
Paul_S
I was disappointed that the floppies didn't contain mods (tracker music).

~~~
fzzzy
I think mod releases and midi releases will probably happen eventually.

~~~
Roboprog
Not exactly “releases”, but freemidi.org gives you a lot to play with.

[https://freemidi.org/random](https://freemidi.org/random)

------
FranOntanaya
As someone that grew through the 00's — I commend the ability to package the
feeling of the era into a style, and some of the things back then (like your
first time opening a Basic interpreter) were neat... but, boy, the cliparts
and Encarta era is not something I'd be nostalgic of.

We had a glimpse of all the information that was out there, but still couldn't
access more than a little bit of it. It was frustrating more than anything
else. Personally I had gladly archived it in the back of my mind till it
started to surge back as vaporwave.

~~~
poisonarena
I grew up in the 90s and clip art nostalgia is strong in my mind! I think I
used Groliers Multimedia Encyclopedia

------
acomjean
Wasn't Mini-discs music on a floppy? IN the US as s format mini-discs weren't
very successful, but I used one in grad school. Put my CDs onto discs. Energy
efficient, didn't skip, remote on the headphone extender cord and sounded
great. The blank disks were fun colors. I have a mini home stereo with a
minidisc changer, I tried a few recently and they still work.

Mageneto Optical technology.

MP3s killed them. People wanted better than 1 cd->1 disc, but the companies
were so worried people wouldn't use them if the quality wasn't great. Sony who
owned a record company really seamed hell bent on preventing piracy to the
detriment of the technology. The little disks only made it to computers later
in life.

I was going to toss them, but maybe I should hold onto them.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MiniDisc](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MiniDisc)

~~~
KozmoNau7
I've started a small collection of obsolete media. So far it's just cassette
tapes, floppy disks, minidiscs, the stuff I grew up with. But I'm slowly
adding stuff, just because I think it's neat to keep them as reminders of what
we used to use.

~~~
chrstphrknwtn
You may find this interesting:
[https://www.experimentaljetset.nl/archive/lostformats](https://www.experimentaljetset.nl/archive/lostformats)

------
michaelbuckbee
My mind just can't accept that this isn't a parody / publicity stunt.

~~~
32qwef
I thought the same thing when all these punk and indie groups were releasing
cassettes. Then I found out that most people didn't play the cassettes. They
bought them because they look good on a shelf. The cassettes have a download
code printed inside (Bandcamp will spit out a CSV), so when you actually want
to listen to the music, most will redeem the code (or just stream it).

So it's still pretty silly, but not as silly as I thought. I have to presume
Floppy releases are similar (Who even has a floppy drive now a days?)

~~~
nerdponx
Punks, at least, most certainly do listen to cassettes. Cassettes are cheaper
to run in small quantities than vinyl. Cassette players are cheap and easy to
find. Punk music sounds good on cassette.

I'm not so sure about floppy releases. But there is probably some overlap
between retrocomputing enthusiasts and vaporwave fans. Maybe they're the
target market. At least floppies are thin; a shelf full of cassettes will fill
up quickly.

~~~
32qwef
> Punks, at least, most certainly do listen to cassettes.

In my years playing punk / indie music (which only ended last year) I did find
a few people who said they listened to the tapes. Most people told me they
didn't have a tape player, and just bought the tapes for display. But there
was maybe one or two people, the hardcore types, who found an old tape deck in
a thrift shop, or had a used car with a tape deck.

Even in those cases, I don't think tapes were for every day listening. I would
see the same people playing music on their phone or what not. Tapes were for
special occasions.

> Punk music sounds good on cassette.

I agree. So for certain projects, I used to record my music onto a tape, and
then feed it back into the computer before I uploaded it. I don't know why
more people don't do this.

~~~
nerdponx
It's a good point about it being for "special occasions". I usually just put
on tapes when my friends are over, and the first time I listen.

We did the same in my last band. We managed to also get some interesting
effects by messing with the mastering process.

------
ynniv
I'm impressed with the state of 32kbit AAC streams. You could fit almost 6
minutes of that onto a floppy, and the quality is much higher than an 8-bit
MP3

~~~
CrazedGeek
How's Opus for this sort of thing?

~~~
sitkack
One can play around with Opus by exporting audio streams from existing video
and audio

    
    
        ffmpeg -i sample.avi -map a out.wav
    

and then encoding that wav to opus

    
    
        opusenc --downmix-mono --bitrate 32 --vbr out.wav cor.opus
    

to decode

    
    
        opusdec cor.opus final.wav
    

and then

    
    
        play final.wav
    

brew install opus-tools sox ffmpeg

~~~
andai
Or in one command:

ffmpeg -i sample.avi -acodec libopus -b:a 32k -map a sample.opus

------
jancsika
Would be an interesting constraint to limit oneself to a single html file and
use/abuse the burgeoning webaudio API to make an album that fits on one of
these.

------
werber
[http://werber.xyz/vaporwave/](http://werber.xyz/vaporwave/) made this a while
back while trying to figure out vaporwave, still don't get it

~~~
busterarm
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OwgLAZ3AtaI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OwgLAZ3AtaI)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QdVEez20X_s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QdVEez20X_s)

I find these are pretty good at explaining the mechanics of the genre

~~~
vertexFarm
I'm sorry, those are bad. The first is a joyless dissection of wordy music
theory, which is to production of music as Freudian literary analysis is to
writing. That's all made up post-hoc by the academics, the artist never has
any of those intentions in mind when they make music and it describes nobody's
creative process. And by the way it's synthwave, not vaporwave.

The second immediately parroted that stupid myth that vaporwave is all some
kind of cerebral criticism of capitalist consumerism. Ugh. One pretentious guy
wrote a big "think piece" about that back in like 2011 and it spread like
cancer despite all the founding producers in those days going on record saying
they have no idea what he was talking about. It's just this soulless and
cynical method of taking the complex, hard-to-pin-down emotions that music can
evoke and cheapening it into some trite social commentary with a shoehorn and
a can of WD-40 to make your banalities fit. So sad. And then the guy in the
video goes on to make terrible imitation vaporwave to further demonstrate that
he just doesn't get it.

~~~
TremendousJudge
Yeah, not sure what the "vaporwave is a criticisim of consumerism" came from.
It's a thing now though, since most people started listening to the genre
_after_ this theory came out, and many interpreted the music with it.

To me, it was always about the feeling of finding weird, old stuff. You listen
to this music on streaming, and you don't know who made it, or where it came
from, and then you just never find it again. It actually sounds better on
shitty speakers, since it increases the feel of listening to a cassette you
found in the dumpster

------
smrtinsert
Vaporwave makes great working music. Anything by ecovirtual on Bandcamp comes
to mind

~~~
zapt02
Eco Virtual is great ->
[https://ecovirtual.bandcamp.com/](https://ecovirtual.bandcamp.com/)

~~~
citrusui
Check out the samples too: [https://www.whosampled.com/Eco-
Virtual/](https://www.whosampled.com/Eco-Virtual/)

------
ttul
Does anyone else remember the brief period in which you could pack 2.88MB on a
3.5” disk?

~~~
isoprophlex
Was that actually real? Or just a guesstimated capacity using disk
compression?

I was maybe 12 years old around that time, and remember being burned by
compressed floppy disks not actually always holding more than 1.44 M... My
memory is hazy (but fond)

Edit: yeah it was actually a thing! That, and many even crazier formats and
storage capacities at
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk)

------
zomtorg
I'm interested to know the following:

Is selling vaporwave songs legal, such as those that remix Michael Jackson? If
not, who is liable - is it the creator of the song or the seller of floppy
disks?

~~~
chippy
Many of them do break copyright - which is one of the arguments in favour of
the "critique of capitalism". You cannot sell stuff and make a profit in this
music genre if you cannot sell stuff.

------
poisonarena
I get the cassette thing because that was an audio format people used for
albums, but in the 90s nobody released albums on floppy discs, so this is like
all gimmick

~~~
munificent
_> nobody released albums on floppy discs_

You're forgetting that for many people, part of their early exposure to music
is music _from within computer games_ , not just music released as standalone
albums.

~~~
ryandrake
Much of my favorite music as a kid were soundtracks from 8 bit video games,
demoscene releases and background music from loaders and cracks. They also
influenced my early tastes/trajectories: I discovered Mike Oldfield, Jean
Michel Jarre, and OMD from a single C64 SID release.

All traded on 5-1/2 floppies among friends.

------
duxup
I always had on and off data integrity issues with floppies .... was it just
me?

------
linkmotif
Good thing there was that “podcast on a floppy” post up on here last week.

------
binarymax
I'm still waiting for the wax cylinder to come back as the coolest media
format.

~~~
twoquestions
See for yourself! I present to you, Metal Recorded on a Wax Cylinder:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fR4BuM6dP44](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fR4BuM6dP44)

------
swirepe
new 35mm film camera when

