Musical Floppy Disk Tribute

Sony recently announced that it was going to stop making floppy disks. These simple storage devices have been around since 1971 and were the mainstay of computing throughout the 1970s and 80s, but have been killed off by the rise of the USB stick and memory cards.

Using some related 8 and 16 bit technology from the era I put together this version of one of my songs, to show what the humble floppy could still do.

Systems used:

Yamaha PSR-630 Midi Keyboard (1997) preloaded with wavesynth patches
Dell X200 Laptop (1999)
Midi Orchestrator Software (1996) Originally for Windows 3.1, but running in compatibility mode on XP)
Wavetable Guitar pick up (1998) To convert guitar playing into MIDI tracks

Some cheats:

Dell Inspiron 1720 Laptop (2008) Used to sample Clarinet and Guitar for the keyboard patches. Also used to record final output and convert to MP3.

Operation:

Each individual track recorded by the Keyboard or the Wavetable
Transferred to X200 by floppy
Edited and sequenced into single MIDI file on the X200
Tested on X200 using Microsoft MIDI mapper local synth (sounds rubbish!)
Floppy disk with midi file inserted into Keyboard and started
Keyboard reads MIDI file and drives internal synth
Output captured by Inspiron, digitally tweaked and converted to MP3.

The tune is something I wrote whilst figuring out an aspect of my current book. The song is referred to in the story and needed setting to music to get the words right. More details here - http://wagar.org.uk/website/?page_id=530

There's no school like the old school Thanks floppies, it was a great few decades! :)

Enjoy! :)

Category:

Music

Tags:

• Floppy
• Disk
• Tribute
• Midi
• Guitar
• Sequencing
• Synthesiser
• Keyboard

[iMPRE7ed]

@GR8TM4N haha, I feel the similar way too ))

[GR8TM4N]

I wish that i could tell that i loved the floppy disk... Some of them were unreliable, and there a time were large programs needed 10+ disks. If one of them had a problem, you were in trouble, and it wasn't very rare :-) ..However, I can't say that i have any bad feelings about them either ... After all, it was all we had, and in any case, the floppy is a interesting ( and very clever in design ) piece of technology at least. ...So, goodbye floppy, it was ( somewhat ) nice living with you :-)