Modern Music Releases on...Floppy Disks?! 

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

VHS used to be one my best sounding recording mediums.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Winamp, now that brings back memories.....

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

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. 👍

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

I will never understood why some people give priority to stereo versus fidelity instead. Even fm tuners in cars, they keep tracking stereo when when the thing is getting a ton of static. Drop to mono, damn I don’t have a manual override anymore!

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.

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

Slightly aggravating that you didn't turn on file type suffixes in the folder view. It's probably not an MP3?

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!

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.

This is amazing!

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

So thats what 'nightmares on wax' means..Rock n Roll on an Edison cylinder!

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.

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

Great video Comp.

The Thinkpad was my dads first laptop, he got it from work.. I remember playing miniclip games on it

A jazz album released on a Jaz Disk.

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.

I want to reliece some of my music on VHS So at least now I know I am not the only one with crazy format ideas to reliece your music on lol

I was about to say use a Thinkpad G41 with its internal floppy drive, but in reality its an Acer in all but name. I have this and the T43p and others. Great machines.

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.

64kbps is floppy compatible, right? I’m pretty sure I copied a song per diskette back in they day.

We make reel to reel cassettes on Chrome. Also FLOPPYS soon. Nft Pic. Doomsday records (Etsy) just saying. & stickers too (thermal) not vapor at all!

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

Next week, Sony will make the Floppyman. Well, may be not but imagine that.

Winamp! It really whips the llama's ass!

I have the thought "What if albums were released on Floppy Disk?" and then RU-vid immediately shows me this lol

What's next, music on CD-ROMS!? Crazy world we live in.

It’s a bit of a shame they used MP3 rather than Opus… considering Opus can sound at least twice as good with the same bit rates. There is something nostalgic about terribly crushed MP3s though, I often crushed music for fun in Audacity just to see what it’d be like.

You can fit a lot of music in a 64k .mod file, and you can fit plenty of 64k .mod files on a floppy. There's probably even enough space for a .mod player and some album art.

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.

I think Zipdisk would be a great media for MP3s. I kinda miss them. The click of death wasn't the drive going bad. It was the power brick. I really wish I could find one new.

I was really betting on them being in OPUS format.... 😔

They should have gone with a different codec that was designed for lower bitrate music and I agree as you said they should have done it in mono. They could have gotten a little bit better sound if they had.

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 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!

The original Audible releases went down to 4 Kbps for mono spoken word. You can achieve a much higher quality of compression with aac+ or WMA ~ many DAB+ stations in the UK use 32 kb via aac codec. Also you can have a listenable experience on WMA at around 48 kb. You could probably fit one song each onto a floppy and it would sound waaay better than this….

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)

Some kind of tracker format would probably be best for floppies, if you want to use sampled audio in high quality.

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.

Opus audio file encoded at same bitrate as mp3 (64kbps) takes 3-5 times less space and sounds like mp3 encoded at 128kbps

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.

There was some interesting floppy CD case from the artist master boot record.(retro like metal/electronic some c64 sounds.) He is on metalblade records so fairly large label.

Releases on Zip250 Disk? I'd go for that. I still have my Zip drives and use them frequently.

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!

I'm actually impressed by how good it sounds I mean obviously it's not a 160 kilobit mp3 but it's really not that bad considering how small it is Also the floppy drive has no problem keeping up That's the buffer specs in winamp that are the problem it waits too long before capturing the next buffer segment if it would do that about a second earlier it would have no problem keeping up.

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.

Floppy disk music is best with MOD and S3M files with a program that you load on the disk that plays the files.

Are you familiar with The Midnight? They are one of the biggest and best Synthwave bands. Check them out

I don't know but it has have been possible to get better quality in a small package using the Opus codec. But I have no idea if it supports really low bitrates below 32kbps. Though from comparisons I've heard it does better at low bitrates and retains more audio than mp3.

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

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.

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

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.

They should,ve disable that notch switch to prevent users to erase the data on it,by changing the mold of it before producing thise floppy disks, Now what i actually expected was that those recordings were 4bit adpcm or 1bit dpcm, Alltrough i don’t how much bits this is,personally it bothers me if people only talk about the amount of kbps and sample rate and not the bit rate,why? I know that sample rate,bit rate and the amount of kbps does have a relation witch each other but i still just want to know the actual bit rate of it. Now this format would be ideal for the beatle,elvis pressley or the jackson 5 because many songs of them were in mono at a low noisy quality.

I have a floppy w/Chuck Yeager's Air Combat on it. Unfortunately, I don't have a joystick that'll work w/modern PCs.

Back in the days, .MOD-files were very popular.

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.

4:53 *Please wait while we transfer you to the next available customer service representative. Thank you!* 🤣🤣🤣

Don't blame the floppy drive. Blame winamp for not prefetching it's buffer early enough.

I wonder How many Drives wouldve beena able to read 2.88Mb formatted drives, to get DOUBLE the quality of songs.

You see, 1s and 0s read from solid state storage can never have the warmth and depth as when read from spinning magnetic medium.

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

Cassette tape -- not a music cassette tape, but for example a Commodore 64 cassette tape with the music formatted for the SID chip.

I thought they were gonna be tracker/mod files in either Impulse Tracker or Modplug format.

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

Doing it with opus or AAC-HE 2 would sound much better. Mp3 was not made to sound good at those bit rates.

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.

8khz is probably a bit better than phone quality, while 11khz is around AM quality, though MP3 will have better dynamic range than either.

What a lovely laptop I own the same model however the screen is full of lines and dead zones. Haven't gotten to fixing it yet... Merry Christmas!

Yes you can put music on a floppy disk I should know I tried to do it in about 2005 with an MP3 and I had to down convert to I think 16kbps if I remember right. It can certainly go lower. And if you wanna make anything sound like a phone you just drop everything below 300 Hz and above 4000 Hz. Unless you're going for that compressed Digital sound. They could've gotten a little bit higher quality if they mixed down to mono but the mix would've had to been set for mixing down to Mono. 64kbps mono is considered voice and 128kbps ( 64 L + 64 R kbps ) considered stereo music in MP3 at least in radio standards without pushing the quality down too much. and then if you don't do stereo you don't have to double that which means they could've doubled the quality going to mono but that would've wrecked the mixing between the left and right Phasing. Below 16kbps but it can get messy which is why most software saves you from yourself.... Audacity will let you go down to 8kbps.

It actually sounds better than I thought it would!

Hmmm.... Zip disks... Now that's an idea...

i still have my win xp laptop, its a toshiba satellite. i also have one of those usb disk drives.

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

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