floppy drive tape delay

now with a project website and a forum! http://mux.papercanary.org -


Three 3.5 inch floppy diskette drives implemented as a tape loop, each one takes its turn acting as a record head, a read head, and an erase head.

After each drive has recorded through all 81 tracks, it rewinds back to zero and plays what it has stored. then it is erased and prepared again for writing.

In addition to the loop system, the video contains some examples of a max patch that I have set up to control the drives for performative gestures.

The drives are controlled with an arduino, which also controls the analog circuitry that is responsible for the read/write/erase process.

The video audio contains the mechanical sounds, which are much less prominent in the line out audio. Sorry for the rough footage!

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Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• floppy
• drive
• reverb
• electronic
• music
• tape
• delay
• arduino
• diy

[phector2004]

is the ticking noise in the audio, or is it just the spinning drive doing that?

Cool project, really like your continuous record vid too!

[demcanulty]

@phector2004

Some of it is in the audio, but most of it in this recording is the open air sound of the motors resonating with the wooden board. Thanks!

[Arnoldismyhero]

Man, diagrams would be awesome. Or some type of instruction for beginners, because I am so fucking into this.

[demcanulty]

@Arnoldismyhero they should be up by the end of the summer, working on a bunch of stuff and switching the site over to a site called Open Music Labs. I'll have boards and diagrams up in the next few weeks i hope. Thanks for the comment!

[demcanulty]

I hope it seems appropriate!

[demcanulty]

the heavy machinery noise is mostly ambient, a result of all three drives stepping at roughly the same time. diagrams, recordings, and anecdotes to come soon!

[TarousDT]

I'm not sure I understand what this actually does.

[Gaia1986]

Hi, I'm stuck at locating the heads and your page is down.

Where do I connect the audio source wires?

[tic0tac1]

This thing is amazing!

Would love to build one but from what you've documented this is way over my head...

I need one of these in my life!

[produKtNZ]

You know those 200Mb ish ZIp drives :D ? I so want someone to try this with that!

[wertstahl]

the sound with the ambience is a work of art for itself. cool atmosphere.