i guess i’ll still do it. my design drops the voltage to the floppy disk motor though, so a lot more than 15 seconds can be recorded. it will affect the audio quality some.

floppy drives spin at 300 or 360 RPM, but if you drop it to 25 RPM you can get a good 3 minutes on a floppy. enough for a short song.

I cut extra windows on the floppy so that I could have multiple heads working the disk at the same time. Depending upon which heads were hooked up and what the rotational speed of the disk was, you could get some pretty interesting echo/chorus sounds. Fidelity was poor, however. I think that was largely due to the shape of the hysteresis curve associated with magnetic materials designed for digital data storage.

Speaking of floppy drive motors- I installed one in a modified cassette deck and hacked the servo PCB, which allowed the transport to run at single/double speed, depending upon how an external switch was set. In combination with an outboard DBX unit, the sound quality was incredible, and it allowed me to do effortless ping-ponging with the Yamaha 4-track recorder I had at the time. I would record 4 tracks worth of music (drums, bass, and two guitars) and mix it down to the modified recorder. Then, I’d pop the tape out of the modified deck, reinsert it in the Yamaha, and have two open tracks left for vocals. Very clean, let me tell you.

Kudos on making my old weekend project a reality though!!