A Floppy Drive Orchestra

With 8 drives working in concert, this “floppy drive array orchestra” takes drive music to a whole new level!  As if that wasn’t enough, [SileNT] decided to use the16x64 LED array that he’s been working on in concert with the drives.

For those that remember, we’ve actually featured [SileNT], AKA [Pawel]’s, work before, where we were impressed that he was able to play the Imperial March from Star Wars on 2 floppy drives. He’s planning more information about his floppy drive music making in the future and maybe even instructions on building your own personal disk drive orchestra. Apparently [SileNT] has an abundant supply of 3 1/2 inch drives, so maybe even this feat can be topped…

Be sure to check out the video after the break of these 8 drives in action. In the video, more tunes are promised “soon”, so be sure to check back or subscribe to him on Youtube for more sweet melodies.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWwhsAYFSRI&w=470&h=315%5D

16 thoughts on “A Floppy Drive Orchestra

  1. It’s hard to believe people used to put up with computers that made such loud noises :P (Obviously not like this, but still)

    In fact, I even remember old hard drives making lots more noise than they do now. Not in the “failing drive” sort of way either. Data access was loud!

    1. One of the louder tricks used to save money on the old 8″ and 5.25″ drives, was excluding any type of sensors to detect which track the head was over.
      This means on power-up, the head could be anywhere from track 0 to 80, and to function the computer needed to know this information.

      Instead, there is a rubber coated bumper just before track zero, so the drive executes 79 back steps.
      If the head was on track 80, you get a relatively quiet head return operation. If it was on track 2 however, you hear the head loudly bang into the rubber stopper 77 times!

      If you are interested in reliving such times, there is a neat little program you can search for using “apple2 disk drive sound emulator”

    1. Ohhh!
      It’s Jingle Bells!
      I didn’t recognize it either :O
      I would probably call it a Jingle Bells remix.

      Actually it sounds pretty good when you know it’s Jingle Bells playing :P

  2. please is there any direct link to the video? It happens I don’t want to use adobe product and I don’t think I should waste an hour or so reading html/javascript code just to see a video.

    thanks.

Leave a Reply to acomputerdogCancel reply

Please be kind and respectful to help make the comments section excellent. (Comment Policy)

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.