
Floppycasts – 1.44MB Podcasts - KirinDave
http://ajroach42.com/floppycasts-1-44mb-podcasts/
======
Scaevolus
For super low bitrate speech, (1.44MB/30 minutes is 6.4kbps), codec2 is better
than Opus, and can go to even lower bitrates. When combined with WaveNet, the
audio quality is _incredible_ , though required compute power is ridiculous.

[https://auphonic.com/blog/2018/06/01/codec2-podcast-on-
flopp...](https://auphonic.com/blog/2018/06/01/codec2-podcast-on-floppy-
disk/#wavenet-examples)

~~~
est31
> the audio quality is incredible, though required compute power is
> ridiculous.

LPCnet gives similar quality with much less compuation needed:

[http://www.rowetel.com/wordpress/?p=6482](http://www.rowetel.com/wordpress/?p=6482)

[https://people.xiph.org/~jm/demo/lpcnet/](https://people.xiph.org/~jm/demo/lpcnet/)

[https://people.xiph.org/~jm/demo/lpcnet_codec/](https://people.xiph.org/~jm/demo/lpcnet_codec/)

~~~
fsiefken
Yes, amazing, but can it be played through Chrome, VLC, mpv or more
importantly Android and iOS?

~~~
cbhl
Broad compatibility is important, but is there someone who has actually hooked
up a USB floppy drive to an Android or iPhone or iPad and read files off of
it?

~~~
fsiefken
ha no, i don't think so :-) All these devices didn't exist when the floppy
drive went out of vogue. I'm not sure if there even are USB floppydisk drivers
for Android or iOS. Technically Android is linux (and iOS bsd) so I suppose
there is a /dev/fd0 capability somewhere. I meant that LPCnet is really
awesome, but when I would distribute a podcast in this format (floppy or rss)
I would like it to be able to be played on devices and OS's with support for
it - otherwise the audience can't play it.

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jancsika
Perhaps you could get it smaller by making a "vector format" for podcasts and
leave it to the audio player to "do it live"

<bgmusic character="spooky" />

<archiveaudio year="1972" type="cop" tone="evasive" />

<foley type="tirescreech" />

<foley type="river" weight="300" />

~~~
mhd
We really need some kind of highly compressible alternative format for
podcasts. Representing speech with a very limited set of code points. It might
be a bit lossy, so you could lose the tone of the voice and other speech
characteristics, but there could be some ways to still represent that by
carefully picking the words you utter in the podcast.

Of course I'm only spitballing here, this would require some pretty advanced
research to be made.

~~~
CharlesW
> _We really need some kind of highly compressible alternative format for
> podcasts._

WebVTT, reproduced at the listener side by TTS? At some point, there's a
quality chasm that can only be leaped by using a format other than sampled
audio.

My question for you is: Why do we need that?

------
enneff
I love the idea, because there's something to almost ideal to me about the
3.5" floppy disk format. I wish I had some reason to use them today, and so I
really want this to work. However the audio quality is just terrible; it may
be intelligible, but it is unlistenable IMO.

~~~
Causality1
3.5mm floppies combined a lot of factors that appealed to me. They were cheap
enough you could give one to someone without wanting it back, they were
contained entirely within the computer so no danger of breaking it off if you
leave it in there too long. Unlike CDs they were rewritable and unlike CDRWs
they worked properly no matter what PC I was writing or reading from. Not to
mention the thoroughly satisfying "chunk" sound when popped into a drive.
Network file transfers will never have that "shove the data right into the
computer, bam!" feeling.

~~~
enneff
There was also the tactile feeling of flipping through a stack of floppies
looking for one specific disk. Now that everything is so high capacity, you
almost never have to physically search for data. Of course the modern way is
superior in almost every way, except it was a kind of wonderful sensation
holding a disk box full of your stuff.

~~~
bitwize
Floppies had richer, warmer bits, man. The bits coming off USB drives are
cold, tinny, and mechanical by comparison.

------
themodelplumber
So, no podcast yet, right? Didn't want to miss anything. That's a pretty cool
idea. I'm all for some kind of subculture where media have tiny size limits,
and if that starts from retro culture then great.

I love to imagine using my 4G connection to download like 60 hours of podcasts
in the few minutes before leaving on vacation...

~~~
xvector
There is something beautiful about efficiency. Small computers (check out
/r/sffpc), efficient codecs, those competitions where people make
games/music/graphics in just a few KBs (forget what those are called -
“demoscene”?). The fact that compressed Wikipedia without images fits on an
8GB USB.

It all fascinates me. It is amazing to see us push the boundaries of
communication under such restrictions

~~~
z0r
There's a demoscene magazine intermittently published in 'demo' form:
[http://www.hugi.scene.org/](http://www.hugi.scene.org/)

~~~
kozak
Would be cool to make a demo that would fit on a magazine page in something
like a QR code (scannable with a normal phone).

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mrob
Does the resampling and bit-depth reduction of the wav file actually help? My
intuition is that a modern encoder like Opus will work better if it has more
information.

~~~
ajroach42
I tried it both ways with opus. More or less the same in terms of quality, but
the resampled file was about 3% smaller.

I imagine it would be less of a size difference and more noticable at higher
bitrates.

------
bArray
I really like this idea, I was personally playing around with the idea of a
bootable magazine that you could read in an emulator. Another idea was to
release an entire album of music on a floppy disk. Both ideas I'm part way
through, but have been incredibly busy.

I prefer the sound of the MP3 in the examples, although both are really dull.
I think using some modern codec like WaveNet or others, whilst sounding
better, kind of defeats the point. I think MP3 is really as new a codec as I
would want to go, especially as pretty much any device that can play audio
that is actively used today can read an MP3 file. (I'm somebody who still uses
an MP3 player.)

That said, I think these floppycasts should simply be shorter, the easier they
are to create, the more likely the idea won't die in the crib. I think 15 or
20 minutes is really not too bad for a start (especially a solo act), specials
could come in multiple parts and still be in keeping of the theme.

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ehsankia
Hmm, listening the the samples [0], the OPUS one is almost unbearably noisy,
whereas the MP3 while, while clearly low quality, is still listenable. Am I
missing something, why is OPUS doing so poorly?

[0] [http://ajroach42.com/floppycast-
examples/](http://ajroach42.com/floppycast-examples/)

~~~
sigmar
he used the opusenc setting "tuned for speech" and music sections (like :22)
sound awful. would like to know what it would sound like without that mode
turned on, as it also surprises me how bad opus sounds vs mp3.

~~~
ajroach42
The opus file is at 6kbps, the mp3 at 8.

Opus file is tuned for speech, mp3 isn't.

The opus file sounds unbearable when the music is playing, but is clearer
otherwise.

Double the bitrate and opus is way ahead.

------
Trixter
LPC (think Speak'n'spell, PCjr speech adapter, etc.) and variants is really
the only way to achieve this. A 1.44MB floppy has 1,457,664 bytes available
after formatting. LPC at 2400 bits per second means you can store 80 minutes
of speech on a 1.44MB floppy.

A big flaw in the OP's testing is that he converted the audio to 8-bit PCM
before feeding it to the encoders. That added 48dB of high-frequency noise and
distortion for absolutely no reason. He might have found his sibilants ("s"
sounds) sounding better had he not done that.

------
climber604
That feeling of nostalgia when reading about 486 DX and Sound Blaster Pro.

------
splitbrain
when I read the title I somehow assumed that the optimization would be in the
length of the recording, not the encoding. I would like a podcast format with
very short episodes.

~~~
enneff
Me too! I was surprised to see the target length is 30 minutes. I think
there's plenty of space for even much more compact podcast episodes, under 10
minutes in length. You can say an awful lot in 10 minutes.

~~~
salutonmundo
Yeah, since a lot of people speed up podcasts anyway, why not speed it up
prior to compression (or learn to talk faster)? (Of course, speeding things up
3x is a bit extreme!)

~~~
benj111
Hmm why not speak 10 times faster, then slow down by 10 times after decoding.

I havent decided whether this is a serious proposition yet....

------
jokoon
There is so many things you could do to make things go well on very small
devices that would cost almost nothing today, if we decided to adopt interface
and software standards to run on durable hardware.

Meanwhile phones are always getting faster and faster and always becoming
obsolete every year. Throwing software away means we are forced to throw
hardware away.

I wish that someday we could just decide to stick to a single system and not
change things, so that system can last 10 years and work on the same durable
phone. It would require making hard choices in OS and software design, but it
would be really worth it.

I hope a day will come where computers or smartphones will be able to last 10
or maybe 20 years and still be affordable. To be honest I don't think I want
to be involved in learning how to develop apps on any phone for those reasons.
At least microsoft and linux are able to maintain a minimal amount of backward
compatibility. For developers that's really important. You don't have a good
ecosystem or a good phone if you cannot attract developers to build apps.

------
xellisx
[http://www.rowetel.com/?page_id=452](http://www.rowetel.com/?page_id=452)

~~~
ajroach42
Codec 2 is on my list to investigate in the near future. Couldn't find
software on the target machines that supported it, so it landed on second
tier.

------
Endy
I'm looking forward to hearing the actual releases. I still use floppies when
I can, and I still have a bunch of old PCs hanging around. It'll be good to
have a valid reason to boot them up.

------
fsiefken
Excellent, I did similar experiments in the past. RealAudio (ACELP) with Helix
is also an efficient option, but Opus is the best. For more quality you can
reformat your floppy with 2MF 3.0, it gives you 2 megabytes on a floppy
instead of 1.44. I used it to get the bible on it and a stripped down bootable
dos+win3.1.. unpack on a ramdrive and start the app. People next to me were
still stuck in the University provided dos wp 5.1 wordprocessors while I could
do WYSIWYG editing with true type fonts!

------
ekphrasis
Reminds me of [https://floppyswop.co.uk](https://floppyswop.co.uk): "a place
for sharing any files small enough to fit on a conventional floppy disc
(1.44meg high density), art, media, sound, noise, its up to you, all files are
hosted here for taking and swopping..".

------
atannen
Regarding resampling to 8kHz, traditional telephony resampled to 300 Hz to
3400 Hz. AM (medium wave) radio was up to about 5000 Hz
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_frequency](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_frequency)

------
CharlesW
Hey _ajroach42_ , can you describe the AAC profile you used, and which
encoder? I'm interested to see how small one could get an HE-AAC v2 encode.

Would you mind linking to the uncompressed source as well?

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_emacsomancer_
opus sounds amazingly good down to pretty low bitrates in general though, but
this obviously pushes beyond those limits

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ChrisArchitect
kinda was hoping for some fun pics of floppy disks..... ;)

And also this all reminds of old demoscene/music tracker days when groups
would release "music disks"

------
Aser
Note that you can only fit 1.38MB on a standard floppy.

