

A MIDI Player on Eight Floppy Drives - signa11
http://kukuruku.co/hub/diy/a-midi-player-on-eight-floppy-drives

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jweather
My personal contribution to the genre:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhChYJzw4FM&feature=youtu.be](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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZGgymGg0Ns)

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tempodox
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.

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ge0rg
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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ftYO5J3ZZQ)

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

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

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PeanutNore
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.

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taejo
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.

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spuz
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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVPjQou42i8)

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pepijndevos
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?

~~~
paines
Metallica unforgiven

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

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

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

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

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v-yadli
Dat overdriven bassline!

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

~~~
cbhl
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.

