Flop rock: inside the underground floppy disk music scene

• codec2

  10 122 8.7 C

  Open source speech codec designed for communications quality speech between 700 and 3200 bit/s. The main application is low bandwidth HF/VHF digital radio.

I'm currently working on a 2HD floppy disk release of a podcast episode which has taken me down an interesting rabbit hole of low-bitrate audio codecs, floppy disk aesthetics and label design.

The episode I'm releasing is 1h40m long, which sounds like it couldn't possibly fit in 1.44MB, but there's an obscure but free codec mostly used by digital HAM radio enthusiasts called Codec2 [1] which can encode human voice in as low as 700bit/s (roughly 315KB/hr). At that quality setting it sounds like complete garbage, although still barely intelligible, and there are no readily available media players for the it (there's not even an established file format) so I'm having to include complicated ffmpeg instructions in a README to get people to play it, but I think it all adds to the charm.

Funnily enough after searching for days for how to fit the original episode in a floppy (tried low-bitrate MP3, Opus and AAC, all of which fail at the task), and after discovering Codec2 almost by chance, I only then came across an article called "Codec2: a whole Podcast on a Floppy Disk" [2] which I probably would've found if I had started by searching "podcast in a floppy".

[1] https://github.com/drowe67/codec2

[2] https://auphonic.com/blog/2018/06/01/codec2-podcast-on-flopp...

• flashfloppy

  59 1,242 6.7 C

  Floppy drive emulator for Gotek hardware

FYI (or others using retro equipment with floppy disks) there's a cheap floppy disk emulator called Gotek that can be connected in place of your 3.5" drive and has an USB connector where you can put a thumb drive with disk images.

For that device there's an Open Source firmware project called FlashFloppy [0] that enhances its features. And I've found today that there's an Open Hardware reimplementation [1] of the Gotek hardware that's compatible with the FlashFloppy Firmware.

  0: https://github.com/keirf/flashfloppy

• WorkOS

  workos.com sponsored

  The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.

  

• OpenFlops

  3 242 0.0

  Open-Hardware Floppy Drive Simulator

1: https://github.com/SukkoPera/OpenFlops

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