I would like to see an album on those punch cards. One song on 500 cards. An entire album in a suitcase.

@footrotdog

2 жыл бұрын

At that card rate, you could probably make a music video too and print the a video frame on each card so that they could be animated as a flipbook.

@edgarwalk5637

2 жыл бұрын

midi format reminds me of punched cards/tape. I reckon you could put midi on punched cards.

@vijfsnippervijf

2 жыл бұрын

Wait… Isn’t that still a thing in the Netherlands? Just with a book instead of 500 cards. And the organ is not an electronic computer, but rather a mechanical one using air and REAL instruments! They’re just very big and expensive, but I heard one when I came home from school!

@hucz

2 жыл бұрын

No. Just because you can doesn't mean you should.

@Charlesb88

2 жыл бұрын

How about a album on “paper tape”? Paper tape was capable of holding a lot more data per then a single standard size punch card while still employing similarly cheap hole punch technology for recording the data. Of course, finding a working paper tape reader that would work with any sort of currently easily obtainable retro computer (or modern PC) would be difficult, especially since it would have to have decent enough sound playback specs (for example, IBM “PC speaker” sound wouldn’t cut it.).

While it's not practical, fitting/compressing multiple songs onto a floppy disk is pretty neat!

@arthtiwari3232

2 жыл бұрын

Its just non sence to put song in floppy ,but its kinda a fancy that people are getting into hardware form of music,at least something good happening in 2021

@MrJ0mmy

2 жыл бұрын

i remember finding some floppy disc and there was a the album by foo fighters the color and the shape on 3 discs songs where ripped from a cd at 8kbps vbr aac for such a low bit rate i was shocked how good they sounded

@gregdaweson4657

2 жыл бұрын

Look up LS240, it could format a floppy to contain 30M.

The audio quality reminds me of the RealAudio streaming radio stations of years ago. Pretty impressive they could get that kind of compression and still make it listenable.

@imark7777777

2 жыл бұрын

Those streams were compressed to some degree usually MP3, I remember seeing a lot of 32kbps and some 16kbps so yeah. Plus if you wanted to listen to them over dial-up...... That usually lead to either a low-quality stream or 2 streams Hi/Low from the same site.

@CtrlOptDel

2 жыл бұрын

Nostalgia for a simpler time in a better age 💕

@volvo09

Жыл бұрын

Yes, those were so bad! But it was cool when all you had was a modem.

Those files are technically MPEG-2, not MPEG-1 standard, and the ultra-low sampling rates like 8khz and 11khz are only supported in Fraunhofer's rarely used proprietary extensions of the spec (sometimes informally called MPEG-2.5) that technically aren't part of the MPEG standards at all so some decoders (especially hardware decoders) may not play them. Regular MP3 can't go below 16khz in the MPEG-2 spec and 32khz in the original MPEG-1 spec. With a modern codec like Opus or xHE-AAC they probably could actually fit an album at acceptable quality (better frequency response especially) in 1.44mb though it still wouldn't be transparent.

@pokepress

2 жыл бұрын

The low bitrates were used back in the day (late 90’s into the 00’s) for Internet radio, so I wouldn’t call them that rare. Then again, I used to run an Internet radio station.

Okay, this is like an early Christmas gift. I've heard of Cassettes coming back, Vinyl coming back, hell people have started to produce 8-Tracks again and I couldn't tell if they were doing it as a joke or not. Floppy-music coming back? That's a new one to me lmao

@rumpbuns

2 жыл бұрын

definitely seen some releases on 8-Track from some very niche labels.

@FloydBunsen

2 жыл бұрын

Quadraphonic 8 track is awesome

@EximiusDux

2 жыл бұрын

And now I wait for a new form of VHS tape to record streams without legal issues. A man can dream...

@spellerlittlewing

2 жыл бұрын

Yeah $40 for an album I never care for accept a few tracks yeah right I’ll stick with MP3 files

@finkelmana

2 жыл бұрын

No, none of them are "coming back." Its not a joke, but purely a novelty. They sell these in addition to their real digital releases. Its just something to make them stand out. Nobody wants to listen to music with inferior audio quality or on devices they dont have.

Back in the late 90’s and early 2000’s, it was pretty common to have low-bitrate options for use in internet radio (once broadband became common and bandwidth got cheaper, you started to see more 128kbps+, especially as 3G proliferated). I tossed a few on a floppy to listen to at school.

@CommodoreFan64

2 жыл бұрын

O yeah I remember back in the late 90's being lucky to have my own phone line with it's own number for local calls in my room listening to Netscape radio over a 33.3K connection, and later 56K connection for hours, and thinking how cool it was getting all that music for free with very limited ads, and stuff not played on AM/FM Radio. Now I hardly even think about it, I just fire up SoundCloud, KZread Music, or TuneIn on my phone long as I have a decent 4G LTE signal as I have my family on Cricket Wireless at $25 a line with unlimited Talk, Txt, & Data. How spoiled we have become.

@mr.pavone9719

3 ай бұрын

My college radio station was one of the first in the country to Livestream over Real Audio Player and it sounded just like this.

They should do these as mod/scream tracker files, this was a popular format before mp3. Could easily get 3 high quality tracks on a disk. And extra bonus would be the ability to load into a tracker and remix the songs , as I did to several years ago.

@ksrele

2 жыл бұрын

I remember the time when I made music in mod format. Then I thought about modifying the mod format to use mp3 samples instead of uncompressed wav samples. Does anyone know if this format (mod with mp3 samples) has ever been created?

@FavoritoHJS

2 жыл бұрын

It appears like MO3 is close to what you are thinking of? Creating it seems kinda hard, though, and it doesn't seem common enough to have tonnes of support.

@nicholasbond1331

2 жыл бұрын

@@FavoritoHJS looks like MO3 is the way. A few common players support it looks like too.

@HChun-wd6mz

2 жыл бұрын

As a tracker musician, would be cool, id support it. Ofc there are modern trackers like OpenMPT (.it), FTII clone (.xm), Milky (.mod)?, Renoise (.xrns) to make music with. Though not everyone likes trackers nor is comfortable of basically releasing stems, projects publically lol

@DanielLopez-up6os

2 жыл бұрын

Yeah was Really expecting Tracker Files :D

I'm happy with CDs. Or a cassette. Or a record. The earliest music I bought was on record. When I was a teenager, 45s was the best way to buy single songs. They weren't specialty items in the 80s, they were just how you bought music. Even cassingles didn't catch on till the very late 80s.

Rappers in particular seem very keen on older media distribution. Underground rap specifically has caused a big wave of cassettes coming back as well as vinyls

@xp8969

2 жыл бұрын

Punk's been doing that with vinyl for 30 years

@sgtcreasegrease

2 жыл бұрын

DJs especially Hip-Hop DJs were the ones pressing up vinyl when regular people stopped buying it. I don't really care for tapes but I'm happy with a nicely pressed record.

2G voice calls ran at 13 kbps, but had a “half rate” option of 6.5 kbps when the local tower got congested. So it dosen't surprise me that these small MP3 files sound the way they do.

@CommodoreFan64

2 жыл бұрын

Yeah, but that "Half Rate" option at least to me always sounded like garbage, and a lot of time produced a situation of can you hear me now!?!?!?!

I was kinda expecting that these files on the floppy disks are in a tracker form (mainly cause I am into that for 1 and 3/4 years now). But well, I was proven wrong.

Turn on file extensions PLEASE! Also I was expecting some kind of tracker MOD type file.

So amazing. That reminds me to 1999. I tried to pkzip an mp3 file 128mbs. So I got three disks for one song. I brought the disks home and unzipped the file from the three floppies. But my 486er DX50 was so weak to play the song with winamp. Wow. I never forget this experience. Keep up the good work. Stay safe. All the best for xmas and the new year.

@volvo09

Жыл бұрын

Yes! I remember wanting to play an mp3 on my 486 dx2 50... Finally came across a sound card, transferred an mp3 over on multiple disks, and the CPU couldn't keep up! I was bummed. Had to be uncompressed audio.

Hearing the music quality is so nostalgic! I remember when my old desktop PC sounded like that.

Switching to the high quality version on the beat drop was delightfully devilish!

Fun fact about that ThinkPad R51, my dad worked around that time in Denso as a main IT guy, and he was a thinkpad guy. He bought for the engineers thinkpads T41, but for production line, he bought those R51s, they were controling the production until wery recently. I just happen to have T41 from that bunch.

i love it when artists do something special to get people interested in their music again , using old media or even unusual media , i still use cassettedecks , cd , mindisc etc now i have a great excuse to breakout my old laptop and floppy drive

You can actually fit 2.2MB on the 1.4MB floppy disks. I used to format disks on a backup unit for the SNES that formatted it to 2.2MB then I would put in my computer and fill up the disks. I never did figure out if or how to format them that big in DOS though.

@AaronOfMpls

2 жыл бұрын

There was a 2.88 MB "ED" format for 3½" floppies, but it never quite caught on. Disks and drives didn't come down in price much before floptical formats started to be announced. And once those came out (Zip disks, LS-120 SuperDisks, etc), there was no reason to pay that premium for 'only' 2.88 MB.

@ShinyTechThings

2 жыл бұрын

@@AaronOfMpls I had a Zip Disk, I actually donated it probably 8-10 years ago when I found it in my garage. Now it would just be used for storing word documents on it 🤣

in 1999, an electronic music label, orange released a vinyl ep by lexaunculpt entitled "double density" that also came packaged with bonus tracks on a 3.5" floppy.

Musicdisks were released by the Demoscene regularly from the C64 and Amiga years into the PC era. Music is built through a tracker, a kind of sequencer in which to order samples. Obviously not the same as these compressed mp3s. Though, interestingly the sample rate back on the Amiga was roughly 8 Kz

Is it weird that I absolutely love how these sound? Haha. Awesome video man!

Back in the 90s, I had a need to be able to quickly test audio card installations on SCO unix, so I had a floppy with an old WWF entrance theme in default au format at 8 khz. I would just cat the from the diskette device straight to the audio device.

I may consider doing this as a promo item for some of my interviews. Since they’re talk-based, I can get away with mono and a lower bitrate.

@FloydBunsen

2 жыл бұрын

Another commenter mentioned that there’s little difference in size with stereo, and there can be some benefit to using stereo

@MrFungi69

2 жыл бұрын

@@FloydBunsen no.. mono will be smaller.

@maighstir3003

2 жыл бұрын

@@MrFungi69 Stereo will be bigger, yes, but if I remember correctly, in MPEG, stereo can be encoded either as two separate tracks (doubling the size of the song compared to having the song in mono on a single track) or as the difference between the tracks - if the tracks are mostly the same, there isn't much of a size difference.

@MrFungi69

2 жыл бұрын

@@maighstir3003 ok, i took the audio from this episode (stereo/~127kbps/aac) converted to wav and loaded in audacity, 99% equal. converted to mono mp3 (32kbps/16khz) the file is 2,788kb. converted the wav again to (what you referred) joint stereo (32kbps/16khz) and the file was the same size :) great, looks like you're on to something there. but mono sounds 10x better than joint stereo in that same space. i had to raise the bit rate of the joint stereo encode to 48kbps for it to sound almost as good, but whoa, file size is now 4,181kb :) over a mb for 12min. what will please you?

The R51 was my very first ThinkPad. Nice to see that blast from my past!

@SebisRandomTech

Жыл бұрын

@lexter Thanks!

So cool to see someone talking about music on floppy disks! I've been releasing music on floppies since 2010 on my little label from Canada called Poor Little Music. I've managed to cram about 30 minutes of audio onto a floppy disk. I think of the compression as part of the art to releasing a floppy. They are always fun to release for people! And yah, you have to slide that tab over! It's like removing the tabs on a cassette! PS I have purchased music on ZipDisk... it's a thing.

@jarnailbrar6732

2 жыл бұрын

Great to hear! So, what compression settings do you use?

@quieky

2 жыл бұрын

@@jarnailbrar6732 WMA files at 5 kbps. Looking at the last one I released. 34 minutes taking up 1.4 MB I also have dabbled with AMR and AWB files. But I find that the WMA format has slightly better fidelity.

@sjogosPT

4 ай бұрын

@@quiekyi had that experience too. WMA are very good at low bitrates. It sounds like MP3 at half bitrate.

Wave files actually had a time in a lower format. It's like 16 colours and wasn't so popular and "forgotten" by force, I guess.

I’d have put one song on each floppy and produced it as an actual album. The term “album” was originally coined when multiple 78rpm records with short runtimes were bundled together to form a longer work. I’d have also compressed it using high efficiency AAC instead of MP3. It was designed to maintain quality down to much lower bitrates. With one track per disc you could probably manage full 44.1 kHz 16 bit audio with heavy compression.

this is really cool. i've actually experimented with putting my music on floppy disks but i wasn't even able to get one song to fit without it getting mangled. they must be doing some serious mixing and editing to the sound profile to get it sounding that good.

The first Album you showed sounds awesome bought it right away !

I love this. This was a great fun video. Good stuff man.

Thank you for telling us about 3D Blast. I support them via band camp. Love the music.

Sounds much better than expected! amazing!!!

In a way, that MP3 was of higher quality than I expected. Really thought it would be worse, more robotic. They should have gone for ZIP discs instead.

@nyccollin

2 жыл бұрын

Hardly anybody has Zip drives in working order or at all. I have one however.

i discovered the first song shown here back in 2022, and it's been one of my favorite songs ever since! i absolutely love the vibe !!

There were some artists that relapsed their music on dual media discs that played on dual sided compatible turntables & CD players. The catch was turntables that would go further in than standard vinyl label run out diameter.

Those are the laptops we used in junior high. They were all hooked up to a server where we could store documents, but we were not allowed to install games or anything that would take up unnescessary space. I worked around this by bringing a 128mb flash drive from home containing games like Elasto Mania and Doom. In addition to that I had WinAmp and a few mp3s that I ran directly off of USB. Good times.

Ah takes me back. This guy really is a modern tech person, this was the norm. It is good to enjoy modern stuff, but this is where it all comes from, and you can go way back.

great video ! keep them coming !

some beautiful physical media shots in this vid!! I'd like to see people find the colored floppys and use ones that match the album artwork for a Full Aesthetic Package! These plain black disks are ok but the neat thing about floppies in the 90s was the colored ones you could get

When launching the video my first reaction was an mp3 is at least 3 MB in low quality. How the heck do you fit one let alone a whole album in a 1.44 MB floppy disk? Nice video!

In terms of fidelity, the best you could probably do on a floppy would be a sample-based format like MOD files. Wouldn’t really be able to do lyrics, though.

VHS used to be one my best sounding recording mediums.

Higher Gatorade. 9:07 Love your videos Colin!

Happy holidays This Does Not Compute.

Thank you so much. 🙏

Eyeliner is my favorite. Good choice!

Great video Comp.

The 90's introduction to MP3 was awesome. The 8khz and 11khz sounds so nostalgic, I remember the streaming radio station then used the 8/11khz and it just has an unique feeling.

Sheeeeeitt. We used to listen to internet radio over dialup at these bitrates.

In case it helps anyone. ffmpeg -i "input" -codec:a libmp3lame -ac 1 -ar 16000 -b:a 8k "output"

I HAVE THIS LAPTOP! It is the newer variant with a Core 2 Duo but is otherwise identical but with all of the bells and whistles! I LOVE IT!

Fascinating little look into what you can do with only around a megabyte of data.

stuff like this is really cool. A while back I saw someone put the whole Shrek movie on a floppy disk., was so cool. Id like to release some music for floppy, but create the music to suit the lower bit rate. Lofi industrial or something.

@DavisMakesGames

2 жыл бұрын

Shrek movie on floppy disk? Must have been at 16x9 pixels...

@VanderJamesHum

2 жыл бұрын

@@DavisMakesGames It was 120 x 96 pixels at 4 frames a second. Made using a custom x265 codec.

@DavisMakesGames

2 жыл бұрын

@@VanderJamesHum Ah, interesting!

This is amazing!

Hey Colin have a great Christmas!

takes me back to listening to streaming music circa the late 90's! Back then i'd take forever to download a low quality MP3 that sometimes only sounded slightly better than these.

FrankJavCee, 3D Blast and TDNC... is this 16kbps heaven (I can't help but wonder, could Opus significantly increase compression? that + 2.88MB DSED floppies could yield much nicer results - in fact, you could go even further and avoid using a filesystem)

@Tsaukpaetra

2 жыл бұрын

I was hoping it would be OPUS too. Maybe for the next version. 😇

I've got some tapes from newer artists but now I want to get one on floppy!

Genuinely surprised it wasn't tracker files given how big tracker was as a format for awhile.

It actually sounds better than I thought it would!

You should have a look at the .mod tracker scene. Artists like Pete Cannon from N4 records have released both the floppy with the early 4 track project and the vinyl with a refined/mastered version of his jungle tracks. As always, really nice and entertaining video. Merry Xmas, Colin, and best wished from Spain!!!

Back in 1998 and 1999 (my year on campus), my university had computers with LS120 drives, which were backwards compatible with floppy disks, but could store about an hour's worth of MP3 on their 120MB disc (of which I own one, which I haven't been able to read since I finished there in 2001 - I suppose it's a kind of time capsule).

I would love to see more use of diskettes in the future.

I am honestly impressed by the quality regardless of the compression. As for the ThinkPad, I have a X60t and could see it still be an amazing retro machine with XP on it.

pretty neat to have at least 10 for nostalgic purposes

Actually 16 kbps is pretty normal for speech-only audio mp3s (or at least it was in the 90s)

Hey Colin, one thing you can do to slightly improve the sound quality is to set the equalizer to rock preset in winamp. Great video.

@nyccollin

2 жыл бұрын

Right? I can’t believe he never enabled the EQ

This might be strange but impressive!

Wow! An IBM r51! That was my firs ever laptop. Mine had an intel centrino processor instead. I inherited it from my grandfather who got it through his job. Love to see more people with this machine!

You featured that ThinkPad R51 on the episode where you tried to install Windows 10 on super old laptops, including a Pentium II-based ThinkPad 390E. That was a fun video to watch. 👍

You can adjust buffer.

The opus codec would be the way to go here. At 16kbps, you get pretty nice quality audio. Far better than MP3. With 64kbps, you vastly exceed the quality of 128kbps MP3. Fun video!

I remember being 8 years old , and i managed to put the Queen song Lazy on a sunday afternoon on a floppy disk , a 1min and 7 sec song. i remember being able to do it in wave format , at x4 speed :P ...but it was possible as a fun experiment

Dungeon Synth artists like Grimdor also release on floppy. It’s a cool novelty and great way to support artists!

This sounds pretty much like a fried copy of an audio cassette. Amazing.

The WINAMP reproduces AM Automobile Radio Stations, I remember 1968 that's how Car Radio with Rock Music actually sound Buick Special 1955 had a Fantastic Car Radio, like Seeking for Signals automatically from a Foot Switch

I really do have to get into vapor wave, since every song you've played on vidoes I've liked.

This reminds me of a little better version of those late 90s toys, HitClips. They had just enough audio cues to remember the original song, but this is a bit better sounding with actual speakers. Fun novelty.

Music on floppy disks is only meant for retro musical keyboards and computers that don’t have a CD drive. I have a Yamaha keyboard that has a floppy drive. And an MS-DOS computer with floppy only. Vinyl and cassettes are making a comeback because of their analog audio and stereo systems, which is simple to play without computers!

Have you heard music release in floppy disk?. Me : No i havent. Watches in amazement

Ahhh Winamp. To which I still use to this day. It really whips the Lammas Asssssssss!

'11KHz, ohhh, we're fancy now' - I was disappointed at no embedded cover art hahahaha

Be interesting if they did a follow up in HE-AAC or something, see just how much sound quality they could wring out of a floppy disk 😛

That's not great; floppy-disk albums should be mods instead of MP3s. Tracker songs aren't full songs, but they can be approximated pretty well at low sizes.

@il_nostro_della_segreto

2 жыл бұрын

Or at least MIDIs. I mean, they could've even at least done a separate master for the low-bitrate digital audio so that it would've sounded better than just a simple conversion.

you can get a tangable feeling from downloads by putting them on something like an ipod

I'd expect most internal floppy drives may have more of a chance to keep up with this; the USB bus must introduce some overhead just due to the conversion and emulation of the floppy drive bus.

8:29 there is enough stereo separation on that that my little soundbar is distinctly stereo. (creative stage). i rarely get a nice distinct stereo separation out of it, although when i do it is awesome, i have even gotten good front back out of it on occasion, but also rarely. something about some sound formats that just make it really work, funnily enough this really low quality sound triggered it.

The fact that they still have the write protect tabs rather than have them ripped off make me believe that they’re making use of new old stock rather than newly manufactured stock.

Damn, I remember hearing my favorite songs with winamp.

Bring back music on reel-to-reel

Good old Winamp, I still use it to this day on my Windows 10 PC

So cool!

There are some pretty cool 64k demos back in the day you could fit on floppies. Most have chip-tune music too.

Winamp, kicking the lamas asssss

Can’t wait to listen to chop suey on reel to reel.

You can overcome those buffering issues by changing the buffer behaviour under Winamp settings. 👍😎🎄

I'm compressing AAC to 12kbps stereo and 7kbps mono. (he-aac v2, q0.15 VBR, 16kHz, spectral band replication ends at q0.3, parametric stereo ends at q0.15)

In the day, on the amiga we would copy the music into a RAM drive and load them so that there was no buffering from floppy

Back in the 90s there were "music disks" which were albums in a tracker-type format, usually mod or xm. That was what I assumed this would be based on the thumbnail. Ultra-low-bitrate mp3 is definitely not what I was expecting.

Was at a Asylus concert last week and was superior see tapes in addition to records at the merch table, but then they didn’t take retro currency- cash.