Floppy Drive Reverb. Recording Analog Audio on Floppy Disks

[linuxboygenius]

Is that Still Alive from portal?

[paulj0557]

I have an idea to take an 8-track to cassette adapter apart, vibrate the 8-tracks PB tape head in front of a recording head and feedback the audio through the vibrating head, meanwhile audio tape can be going between the two heads, perhaps off to one side so that 1 of the two stereo tracks have tape and the other half is just the mated PB & REC heads. Having a tape monitor circuit would be simple...in fact all of this is simple really, I just have too many projects right now, so someone do this

[tankjr85]

I can't believe we had the same idea, when i was a kid i opened up an old 5.1/4 hard drive and i wanted to feed some audio to the heads and try to listen it back with a tape head amplifier.

[gsagula2]

She is virgin!

[BitGridTV]

I see rappurs using this allready.

did anyone try to record on HDDs yet?

[CassetteMaster]

@BitGridTV My goal is to build a machine to record audio on a very large hard disk (and also on the big floppy disks).

[kinmanyuen]

omg shes intelligent

[tavit111]

lol it sound like jigglypuff ;)

[t0nito]

My kind of woman.

[DizGelz16]

2:14 [audio sounds like "Still Alive" from Portal..] hehe :D

[justinmoss101]

YYEEAAYY PORTAL!!!

[StreisandIsLove]

That is pretty neat! :) Also approve of the song choice. :D

[RyuDarragh]

This kind of delay used to be done by leaving the record head and playback heads on a tape deck with 3 sets of heads in the circuit during recording. My old Pioneer RT701 could do that. The effect was used in an episode of ST:TOS episode "And the Children Shall Lead" for the voice of "Gorgan".

[macmule]

i don't understand anything. must be stupid.

[richardbirch2007]

Could be interesting with an old Seagate MFM hard drive.They have no controller on the HDD itself and just has basic lines for data and control.

[samuraimoose]

the cake is a lie?

[CmdrTobs]

Oh noes, Americans talking about this mystical 'Sodder' again.

[jeriellsworth]

@CmdrTobs Yeah. Yeah.

[produKtNZ]

@jeriellsworth Hey, american. it's Solder. Always has, Always will be.

Same story with Aluminium. Not Aluminum

Same story with using correct capitalisation of americans.. Which I didn't bother to do, you know, I just thought I'd jump on the 'bastardise our language' bandwagon...

=\ fuck sake....

[dogsofwarclan]

@CmdrTobs u clearly dont know how a pc works

[CmdrTobs]

@dogsofwarclan eh?

[RyuDarragh]

@CmdrTobs: Get back in the lift and elevate, boyo. This is an excellent bodge. I love language and comparing dialects of English is almost as much fun as playing musical machine translation :P On a serious note, the prononciation of "saul-der" as "sod-der" is due to the enunciation of the "o". Since the "o" is said with an "ah" inflection in solder here in the US, the "l" frequently drops out. In soldier, the "o" is said with an "oh" inflection, so the "l" *is* left in.

[CmdrTobs]

@RyuDarragh Thanks Amerrikan!

I'm unconvinced there is a method to the madness. Reminds me of how 'mobile' becomes "moble" even though the same people manage to correctly pronounce 'bile', "bile".... Or how 'Iraq' is "Eye-raq" but 'Italy' miraculously manages to remain "Italy".

In the end it's just a case of a of Americans "bastardise our language" like ProduktNZ said. It's ok, after all English itself is just 2nd-hand very mispronounced German. It only matters if accuracy is lost.

Toodles!

[RyuDarragh]

@CmdrTobs: Some of us love language and use it as well or poorly as suits us every day. Me, I cam grok almost any speaker of English and have only been foiled by 8 in my entire life. Which is now shorter than I like to think about :)

[CmdrTobs]

@RyuDarragh Me? I loath language. I'll mo you some symbols and you dem me some words.

[thedarkone2134]

@CmdrTobs None of my projects would work without "Sodder". The mystical properties of it are an essential part.

[TheDeadlyKind]

You might have made floppy disks relevant again. At least in some small niche.

[ELTIOKAI]

Scratching whit a floppy Disk awesome xDDDD

[Meteotrance]

guess what i need a space echoe how did you make this wizardry ^^

did you have some paper document to build the same.

[jeriellsworth]

@Meteotrance Some guys put together a forum out on the web some place that documents this project more. I don't have the link on me at the moment. 

[lexichronicle2]

@jeriellsworth told yars they'd be after it's gold :P

[Stoney3K]

Can you pull off the same trick with an old hard disk?

I'm thinking spinning 'tone' wheels on multiple platters, with a bank of (transposed) samples on each cylinder. Kind of a retro-80s cross breed between a Mellotron and a Hammond organ.

[lexichronicle2]

I don't get why this has 5 thumbs down.

Yeah... it's a delay.

But no.... it's not a normal delay, and it sounds better than a lot of the presets on the $1000+ Lexicon processors I've had.

[leveeisbroken]

ive got a 3.5 inch floppy if your interested

[dooftea]

what a fantastic idea i will have to make one for myself. good song choice by the way.

[TeamNES1]

1. Way too cool! I never thought audio would be possible on a floppy.

2. Nice cabaret arcade game you got in the background, Jeri... Tempest owns!

[kissdomcso1]

Is it really?

[fr0sth4x0r]

Totally know what i'm doing this weekend...

[AdolfNinjaHitler]

i have that c-cassette player righ next to me :D

[lexichronicle2]

more delay facts! Mike who wrote tubular bells, the exorcist tune, made those tracks on a single line tape, rewinding it and then recording the next instrument over the original. he wore the oxide off eventually and had to redo it all. It was the first track Virgin released & made lots of money, but mike was paid with a few lunch vouchers. delays are HEAVILY used and are how chorus / flange effects work as well. chorus is abused t' fuck by studios, to thicken voices with multiples (see; M'min'M)

[nrdesign1991]

I thought about the exact same thing when i was like 8 or 9 :-)

[lexichronicle2]

@nrdesign1991 aye! I've seen other people messing with this idea using different things. one of the first studio effects was tape delay, but ANYTHING that can store and playback will work. the beatles created the 'flanger', when one of them put his finger on the reel of the tape loop and distorted the rpms. a guy online has also made a bit of software that can scan records and then play them back by running a virtual stylus around the groove the scanner can see.

[nrdesign1991]

@lexichronicle2 I totally need that software! I gotta try it out. Do you have the name of the program?

[lexichronicle2]

@nrdesign1991 noooo, you'll have to have a google for him. he was in israel last time i saw him, if that helps accelerate things at all. i don't know if he improved on it, but the errors in the scan and software made it sound a bit mucky, not HiFi. There are also record players that use lasers as the stylus for none contact reading (the diamond tip of a stylus wears the groove out each time it's played). They're about $15k+? Maybe Jeri and you electronicsy guys can get that down; laserdisc?

[lexichronicle2]

@nrdesign1991 the beatles went crazy with tape loops sometimes, to create some of the sounds in the tracks they'd have huge loops of tape running round the studio between heads. the beatles, as per usual for well known heroes, relied on other people for a number of things that made them famous. the studio engineers and managers forced them to release some of their more famous, odder tracks, or to use weird effects and instruments; "the fifth beatles"

[lexichronicle2]

that sounds really nice! go to Harmony Central, then the effects forum and there'll be guys there who'll pay you for that

[computerboy13]

NO Way!!! I wonder if it would be any different on a 5.25 inch disk. It may sound more normal since the heads are more spaced out

[LunaVorax]

3:00

Jeri "There you go Georges, what do you think of that ?"

George :O

Hahahaha !

[wayne205stevens]

Ha ha that was mint! Can you do it with the LS120 drive? I dont see why not :)

[coolpiza]

Wow, this is really cool.

[Ausninja]

Dont Copy That Floppy?

[thewii552]

for some reason, there is no index pulse coming out of my floppy drive (yes, I am trying this). Any ideas?

[thewii552]

what are you powering that with?

[nevenen]

i pissed myself! fantastic...

[richardbirch2007]

This is awesome!

[n7uqa]

Man, it's rare to see girls interested in electronics. I have been mucking around with electronics since 1970, I'll have to dig out an old floppy drive and try this.

From what I can tell, the tape recorder was used to drive the heads on the floppy drive. Oh I like your full size Tempest game :) I used to have one years ago, now I have to use ROM images and MAME.

[chupathingy99]

Is that "Still Alive"?

[spudw2k]

Sounds like it.

[BmoreFashion]

amazing...go jeri...you inspire us all!

[a120068020]

Why does the tape recorder underneath need starting/stopping? Surely the analogue audio can amplified and played without any other mechanics? I didn't understand that bit.

[MegaElhacker]

what is is it?

[Amishman35]

Mabye you could play back some old computer data disks into a digital recorder and write a program that recovers the data in software. There are many Amiga and Apple II disks out there rotting away with seemingly no way to save the data on them.

[Disasteradio]

AAAAAAARRGGGHHH JERI THIS IS BRILLIANT!

I want my seagate optigan. Now.

Wait, what do data disks sound like?

[calvinthedestroyer]

I still have some 8inch floppys and drive....

[SquidMan64]

They need to make more girls like this ;_;

[LANmineTFC]

@SquidMan64 they = ?

just wondering lol

[wrtlpfmpf]

Well of course you could record more by making the disk spin slower. The magnetic wavelengths should still be small enought for decent audio.

The "bleeding" effect is actually also found on tapes which have been stored badly. There the magnetic information diffuses into the other layers of tape.

[SunnyShawFilms]

i need this girl in my dark lab

[deadmalleus]

to do what?

[caucasiannigger]

Try to modify harddisk into a microwave!

[caucasiannigger]

Nerd! I'd like to sleep with you...

[LuTELLO]

I am so doing this!

I wanted to do the same thing with analog video when I was a kid. Good luck on that!

[linuxlove4004]

k, now can you make a video on how to make this or is there a link i can follow to make this?

[lavishmcronald]

@linuxlove4004 I would also like to know how to make this, spread the love to less crafty!

[deadmalleus]

i think i recognize the song xD also the cake is a lie

[ErikKiliam]

Jeri! Give us something! Where are you going with this? Will there be a short how-two to get people going in the right direction?

Anything! We demand..... something!

[LuisFelipeGD1978]

Your very pretty and tech savvy..... so you must be the perfect girl : )

[Textra1]

Who is this woman? I'm so in love. *swoon*

[MAJIKVEGGIE]

MINIDISC FOREVER!!!!!!!

[NeatStar]

Is there any chance you can write up a How To on your website?

I really want to put this into a guitar stompbox so I can trigger it "on the fly" with my guitar.

If you can do that, and I actually make it work, I'd happily send you the prototype as a thank you.

Great little discovering you have here.

[tomizzo11]

your mom has a 3 and half flappy

[calamnity]

Jeri, did you try using the digital record amp already in the floppy drive? I would have thought driving it with a PWM signal modulated by your audio source ought to work. Then I guess the read amp would effectively form a class-D pre-amp.

Don't know what sort of frequency of digital signal floppy drives usually expect, but I think they don't care at all about formatting or sectors or anything like that. That's all normally taken care of by the floppy controller card.

[jeriellsworth]

For giggles I tried running audio into the write line of the drive and wasn't surprised that there is a lot of signal shaping happening.

A few weeks ago a guest of the show explained how to make a simple PWM circuit with a D flip flop and a clock. It works both forward and backwards and maybe a simpler way to make a floppy drive recoder/player

[finnw1]

But wouldn't that partly spoil the fun as you would no longer get the signal bleeding into adjacent tracks?

[Monochram]

OMG! MARRY ME!

[Pikkey63]

:-O

sooooo funny!!! 

Super LOL for the idea concept!

Jeri strikes again..

[cgmp84]

It was know (and done) before that you can record analog data on an hard disk. This is the first time I see doing it on a floppy. You can even record video signal on an hard disk, just search cmx 600 on youtube.

[Afrotechmods]

The scratching was awesome. This is the best show on the internet for circuit nerds.

[jmiller29]

I had this idea years ago but never pursued it. Thanks for proving my concept!

[BoredChick]

lol Sill Alive.

[sazma]

any chance you'd sell one of these with dumb-user controls? I know nothing about electronics and would love to have this as a delay pedal.

[imgod22222]

very intersting =]

I'd like to see diagrams of how you modded the floppy drive and which parts you connected to the amplifier, etc.

I DO want to turn this into a guitar pedal effect.

[bibulb]

So the keyboard controlling the HD idea - kind of a ... um, a digital, disk-based Mellotron-eqsque thing? (At least, a keyboard-controlled-analog-sam­pler thing?)

AWESOME.

[Neodudeman]

Circuit Girl, I've been watching your other videos with Fat Man, and I just want to tell you that you and Fat Man have reinspired my love for electronics and components, and all pieces of electric hardware.

To say you two are awesome, to the fullest extent of that word (literal awe), is an understatement as a testament to your genius.

Thank you very much, Circuit Girl and Fat Man. Thank you for re-kindling this passion, and reviving my technolust.

[lewisleeming]

Phat!!! Love it.

[bboy310]

Very very very good the way you've done it. Your clever to think of it then do it first time ive seen it

[Chick6517]

This has got to be like the 5th vide i've seen like this. pretty cool. haha I like yours the most. I can't wait to see more of your work

[pemdasi]

Very, very interesting. The idea to slow/speed up the drive motor via cv is interesting, but you could also record notes at different points on the floppy and use CV to move the head up/down to select the notes.

[madAlric]

I would like to see something of a how-to on this hack. I have a couple floppy drives sitting around that I could do this to (3-1/4 and 5-1/2), and would like to see/hear the results. I'd also like to hear this from a HDD. It'd be a lot more work to build the HDD version, but I'm betting it'll be worthwhile.

[ErikKiliam]

I love using old tape recorders for crushing noise and the floppy disk format is a very interesting. I choose vintage gear just to work with them.

This is the intriguing project i have every seen. I am completley out of words here.

Will there be a more comprehensive guide for this? What is your goal with this besides making it work with larger drives?

I will update your blog twise a day until you write more about it. Thanks for making my day.

[Neodudeman]

Featured on hackaday.

Very nice.

[dangertoons]

OMG! I knew it was "Still Alive"! No way! I was like, "Is that-.....Nah can't be.."

[tttuberc]

Really neat!

Any info on which wire goes where to control the movement of the head?

Thanks

[jeriellsworth]

I'll blog about this soon, but the circuit was very simple.

The edge of the connector has a signal out call index, which is generated once per revolution of the disk.

I feed this back into the step pin on the same connector.

I tied the drive select lines and motor lines to ground to enable the drive.

Added a push button between the direction pin and ground. This allowed me to control the step direction while it ran.

The soldered the two wires from the tape head to the top floppy head

[amalmin]

So i'm trying to reproduce this using a 3.5" drive and an old console tape recorder. The drive movement stuff is working fine. It's nice the index pulse and step input are both inverted, makes it very easy. and the direction line seems to mostly float high on its own so i don't have to find 5v for it.

However, i am having no luck with the actual head! Each head has 5 traces going to it, 4 of which show resistance (5th is open). but i have had no luck getting audio into or out of it. :(

[jeriellsworth]

Seems like that has a few more wires than what was on mine. I'm not at my lab this week, so I can't check the resistance of the head.

I could hear noise from the data on it before I erased it with a strong mangnet (spinning in the drive and moving the magnet)

[amalmin]

Interesting. Do you know if the drive you used was HD? I suppose i might be seeing two heads, one for each track width. However the four traces seem to be interrelated, which makes it confusing.

The fifth trace turns out to be connected to the shield.

The resistance between the four traces varies between 4.5 and 33 ohms. very confusing. The resistance on the tape deck is about 200 ohms.

I wonder if I have a DD drive somewhere.

[rasz]

holy poopoo im in hackheaven

[bd594]

This is a great new tool for musicians

[Pilotgeek]

We need more girls like Jeri. =)

[matcochr]

What a great idea. I could never do this but I'm really glad that somebody can, and is doing it.

[frollard]

Good job on hitting hackaday!

[taogiliam]

slow down the spin.

[SHOOTANGAEMS]

It might be cool to try this with a 5.25" floppy and see if you can't store more audio on the larger disks.

Hell, why not try it with an 8" floppy if you can get your hands on the drive and disks.

[pamperchu]

i should try that with the 8". I have a dual 8" drive with a stack of 8" floppys. ^__^

[rasz]

to store more audio just slow down the main motor, audio density is lower than Floppy data density. Your free to calculate both for bonus cookie points :)

[AvWuff]

Cool video, but the dude on the left is an idiot.

[pelrun]

There's a fool here, but I don't think it's him.

[jkeyzer]

Nice work, Jeri! I love this project!

[turklejink]

This kicks ass. I want to hear a FAT filesystem!!

[jeriellsworth]

Floppies with data sound very much like a modem. Go figure.

[rattu123]

@turklejink LOL! I see what you did there!

[FrazDog666]

I want to learn more about this. Absolutely amazing!

[Kevbo4]

The cake is a lie... lie... lie... lie...

[jeriellsworth]

hehe