Floppy disk portable music player

I have had the craziest idea, maybe it only seems so good right now because I'm drunk but I remember having it before I had drink today

Okay my idea is an mp3 player that can play music from floppy disks!

I know I wouldn't be able to fit much more than one short song on each disk but I dont care, all my favorite old computer-made music is short and can be made into high quality mp3's and still only be about 700kb.
Anyway, might it be as simple as plugging an external usb floppy drive into an mp3 player?
Would there be any way to make it play MIDI files or MOD files?

I dont even know if this would be possible but it would be so cool to lug around a floppy disk drive and a bunch of fd's and periodically eject them and insert a new one to play the next track!

Plugging a USB floppy into a generic mp3 player PROBABLY won't work. The drive won't be recognized, and in any event the mp3 player would be most likeley unable to provide suffcient current to operate the drive. MP3 Players generally lacks the EHCI controller that polls and then recognizes a USB device by class, therefore its unlikely it will be able to act as a USB host. This assumes, of course, a box-of-rocks dumb mp3 device.
An extension to USB called USB On-The-Go allows a single port to act as either a host or a device — chosen by which end of the cable plugs into the socket on the unit. Even after the cable is hooked up and the units are talking, the two units may "swap" ends under program control. This facility targets units such as PDAs where the USB link might connect to a PC's host port as a device in one instance, yet connect as a host itself to a keyboard and mouse device in another instance.
It might be possible to use a PDA type of mp3 player or device that has host capablilites to do this. You might need to code a driver, and there is still the power problem..

Cheers
Harold

Yes, this is doable...sort of...but may be quite a bit harder than you are expecting. Floppy drives are VERY difficult to interface directly, and I doubt many MP3 player have the needed drivers or BIOS instructions to support a floppy drive. However if you are willing to forget about MP3 encoding, and willing to use good old analogue recordings, then you can fit a LOT more tunes onto a standard floppy disk than you might think!

This is something I played around with a number of years ago. Basically you can wire a floppy drive to control the disk motor and read/write head quite easily. If you then breakout the wires from the read/write head, you can wire them directly into the circuit board of a common cheap walkman style personal cassette player (in the same place that the tape head would be connected - they are basically the same thing). you now have a walkman that uses a disk instead of a linear tape.

It's a little more involved than that, but it's the basic idea.


The only problems with the ammount of recording you can fit on a disk, is down to the way the drive head moves in fairly large steps (which is something I was never able to solve - though more options exsist now) and the physical size of the read/write head - basically, the smaller it is, the more you can fit. It may be possible to use a read/write head from an OLD hard drive (something like a 20 or 40MB - yes Megabyte...) which is MUCH smaller. Newer hard drives will probably be of no real use, as the heads are far to small and need to be in incredibly close proximity to the disk surface (the gap is smaller than a single particle of smoke!).

I did get this to sortof work (it wasn't something I spent a lot of time on, was just for the hell of it), but I don't really know what length of recording time you would get from a standard floppy drive head setup.......that issue never really came up with the bodged together stuff I was using.

SS

HAC wrote: there is still the power problem..
Cheers
Harold

I was thinking of finding one with an external power adaptor and then hooking up a load of batteries, so I have a big power supply to lug around too

Siliconous Skumins wrote:
This is something I played around with a number of years ago. Basically you can wire a floppy drive to control the disk motor and read/write head quite easily. If you then breakout the wires from the read/write head, you can wire them directly into the circuit board of a common cheap walkman style personal cassette player (in the same place that the tape head would be connected - they are basically the same thing). you now have a walkman that uses a disk instead of a linear tape.

It's a little more involved than that, but it's the basic idea.

Holy mother of brass that sounds perfect! Tell me what more is involved!

Siliconous Skumins wrote:
(something like a 20 or 40MB - yes Megabyte...)

I have some 120mb floppy disks but not the appropriate drive to use them with

by the by:

Siliconous Skumins wrote: use good old analogue recordings, then you can fit a LOT more tunes onto a standard floppy disk than you might think!

How would one go about getting an analogue recording to a floppy? I'm willing to use whatever file format or music medium I have to!



This has all been highly interesting thanks very much guys, any further more detailed input would be greatly apreciated

JingleJoe wrote:

Siliconous Skumins wrote:
(something like a 20 or 40MB - yes Megabyte...)

I have some 120mb floppy disks but not the appropriate drive to use them with

Actually, the bog standard floppy disk is capable of storing hundreds of Megabytes of data - it's only the existing drives that are unable to do so. I think it was Sony who developed a 120Mb floppy drive using standard 1.44Mb floppies, and had plans for drives of higher capacities - sadly nothing really became of these. Standard 1.44Mb floppy disks have also been used as cheap recording media for MIDI instuments, digital cameras and even a video camera that could store about 45mins per disk...though with the exception of the MIDI instrument use, non have ever made it to market as a succsess.



The analogue recording to the floppy will be the same as you would record an audio tape - it's really a tape recorder that uses a floppy disk instead of tape, so bung a disk in and press "record".

The main problem to sort out for the walkman diskdrive, is getting the drive head to advance smoothly as the disk revolves (think of the tracks on a vinyl record...). The floppy drive doesn't make a smooth transition down the disk surface in a single track, instead it uses multiple tracks and 'jumps' between them. This is the issue I was never able to solve at the time (due to the 1.2 degree stepper motor used for the head mechanism).
However, there are two possible easy answers to this: replace the stepper motor on the head, with a geared down motor at a constant speed (the tape motor from the walkman would be ideal for this). Or modify the existing stepper motor system used, and possibly monitoring the position of the the disc to allow the track stepping to take place at exactly the right moment, to avoid interuption.

You should be able to get suitable small gears from an old clock or watch (it doesnt have to be accurate, as long as it's geared low the motor can then be adjusted to suit), and by varying the speed of the motor, you can experiment with an increase or decrease in the track gap width to find something that works well.


I was able to bodge it enough to use the existing stepper motor, but it often caused the sound to skip and usually it would jump out of sync if it advanced too soon. It was a pretty basic setup I had to work with - think I used a magnet and reed switch to advance the head to the next track....
Mind you, I did this when I was about 11 year old - 20 years later and I can fix these problems now.

SS

I remember way back when, went to an IBM seminar on the future of magentic storage, and it was suggsedt that the theroetical max for the standard 3.5" floppy was in the range of 200-250MB. Its not just the track and block size, but bit density. After a certain point, you can end up with a phenonon called "bit flipping", which can happen on thin oxide magnetic media once you hit a high enough density. You need to increase the magnetic field strength and that can cause some issues if one has a "weak bit" caused by uneven oxide layering.. I know that Sony introduced the HFD format in 1998, which claimed 200MB for a 3.5" format floppy..
This is one of the inherent limiting factors to any flexible magentic media (floppies, tape, etc). You can get around this to some degree by increasing the size of the media, and with really good hardware error correction schemes..
Cheers
Harold

Looks like I'm going to have to do some experimenting now to try and find some floppy disk drives and cassette players for free *rubs hands together*
But SS, will the wiring be pretty obvious with a little googling to find out which part of the cassete player/floppy drive is which? I know what the magnetic head thingy looks like but I wouldn't know which is which if there were two one for writing and one for reading.

It is very weird to see you post about being drunk when in the USA we can not drink till 21.
good luck with your creation.

cheers
Dandelion

Dandeliondream wrote:It is very weird to see you post about being drunk when in the USA we can not drink till 21.
good luck with your creation.

cheers
Dandelion

You've never heard of underage drinking ? But even so I am of age here hahahaha!

(man that was a fast de-rail )

JingleJoe wrote:

Dandeliondream wrote:It is very weird to see you post about being drunk when in the USA we can not drink till 21.
good luck with your creation.

You've never heard of underage drinking ? But even so I am of age here hahahaha!

(man that was a fast de-rail )

I know about all that , people were talking about that kind of thing on BG,but it is still weird for me.
if you came to the USA would you be able to drink if you were on vacation?
or would I be able to drink out thair?
THIs iS All VeRrY sTrAnGe.

cheers
Dandelion

Actually,the US National Minimum Drinking Age Act of 1984 required all states to raise their minimum purchase and public possession of alcohol age to 21. Its not the drinking that's illegal. States that refused to do so, would have federal highway funding uct.
Up here in Canada, legal drinking age varies by province.

Cheers
Harold

I'm acctually proud of this topic de-rail, I dont think you could de-rail a thread un-intentionally, so quickly, to a topic so far from the original without trying to:
Floppy disk drive music players and magnetic data storage to drinking and the legal drinking age differences between different places

Sorry,I did not mean to de-rail your topic.
I just trail off some times.........Sorry.
I dont have a floppy disk drive,but I have floppy disks I will have to find one.
I dont think I can make anything like your plan.
Good luck.

Dandelion

JingleJoe wrote:But SS, will the wiring be pretty obvious with a little googling to find out which part of the cassete player/floppy drive is which? I know what the magnetic head thingy looks like but I wouldn't know which is which if there were two one for writing and one for reading.

Pretty much yeah. There isn't actually that much to wire up, all you need to do is swap the tape head connections over to the disk head (you may have to experiment to find out which is the read / write connections of the the head - but there isn't that many to choose from), then a simple trick to make the disk motor spin up (shorting a couple of pins on the 30pin floppy cable connector).....that's basically it.

Like I said the only challenge will be to get the disk head to move smoothly, but that shouldn't be too much of an issue.

One thing to note however, is that floppy drives are double sided, so the drive will have TWO heads (one either side of the disk) - but the tape player will only be able to use one at a time. It should be possible to simply wire a switch to swap between sides of the disk, but I'm not sure if you will be able to record to both sides. Reason being that you will be changing the way the tracks work, so chances are you will overwrite the other side's track. Worth trying anyway.

If you need any help identifying what bits are what, I'm sure I will be able to help out.


Of course, failing all that there is always this option:
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=X4SCSGRVAQE&feature=related

SS

Dandeliondream wrote:

JingleJoe wrote:

Dandeliondream wrote:It is very weird to see you post about being drunk when in the USA we can not drink till 21.
good luck with your creation.

You've never heard of underage drinking ? But even so I am of age here hahahaha!

(man that was a fast de-rail )

I know about all that , people were talking about that kind of thing on BG,but it is still weird for me.
if you came to the USA would you be able to drink if you were on vacation?
or would I be able to drink out thair?
THIs iS All VeRrY sTrAnGe.

cheers
Dandelion

No, it's the laws in the place that you are that apply. So a British citizen of age 18 would not be able to drink in a bar in the US. However an American of 18 would be able to drink in an English Pub.

In Scotland it's 16 if you are drinking unfortified wine or beer with a meal.

Z.